Vodou has no scripture, no central authority and no founding text, and the written record about it was for two centuries produced overwhelmingly by people hostile to it.
Colonial administrators in Saint-Domingue recorded the practices of enslaved Africans as security threats. After the Haitian revolution, a great deal of nineteenth and twentieth century writing about Vodou served an argument about whether Haiti was fit to govern itself, and the sensational literature of the United States occupation period, which gave the wider world the zombie and the doll, was propaganda before it was ethnography. A reader consulting older sources is very often reading the case against Haiti rather than a description of a religion.
Serious ethnography, from the mid twentieth century onward and increasingly by Haitian scholars and practitioners, is the usable body of work, and it is candid about its own limits, since much of what a sosyete knows is transmitted inside it under obligations of secrecy.
The tradition's own transmission is oral, embodied and initiatory. It passes through songs, drum rhythms, the vevè drawn on the ground, and the training of initiates by an oungan or a manbo. It is not that this has been imperfectly recorded; it is that it is not a text and was never meant to become one.
The atlas therefore states what kind of institution the service is, and what the structure of the pantheon looks like, and reproduces none of the material that is held within the sosyete.