Calling the Ifa corpus a scripture is a decision worth stating. It has no autograph, no canon list, no closing date and no institution empowered to say what belongs in it. What it has is a structure every practitioner agrees on and a body of verse no practitioner holds in full. The structure is 256 figures, called Odu: sixteen principal ones, the Odu Meji, and the two hundred and forty produced by pairing them. A divination produces one of these figures, and the figure is the address at which the answer is kept.
Under each Odu sits an open set of ese, verses in a Yoruba register full of archaic and proverbial forms. An ese does not state a rule. It narrates. Someone in the past faced this situation, went to a named diviner, was told to sacrifice a named thing, did or did not do it, and this is what became of them. The diviner's task is to select, from what he holds, the case that fits the client in front of him. That is why the corpus cannot be closed: a tradition of precedent has no reason to stop accumulating precedents, and a priest who has trained for twenty years and one who has trained for five will not recite the same Odu the same way.
So there is no copy. There are priests, each carrying a portion, and the portion is acquired by memorisation over years alongside a teacher. That is what this atlas means by an oral corpus, and it is why this entry describes a shape rather than presenting a text.