Ifa is held in memory, and the scale is the point: a fully trained babalawo commands hundreds of verses distributed across all 256 odu, together with the herbal preparations, prohibitions and songs attached to them, acquired through years of apprenticeship to a named teacher. UNESCO inscribed the Ifa divination system on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2005, on Nigeria's nomination. The vulnerability is structural and is discussed openly by practitioners: the corpus exists only in the heads of living people, transmission requires a long apprenticeship that fewer young people undertake, and when a senior babalawo dies without having fully trained a successor, the verses he alone held cease to exist. Efforts at recording and transcription — audio archives, published collections, university programmes — are a response to this, and they are themselves controversial for the reasons the next entry describes.