In the nineteenth century, the affiliation of a house to a particular nation may have been determined by the ethnicity of its African founders, but subsequently it came to be based on initiation; that is, priests or priestesses, regardless of their biological ethnic ancestry, belonged to the nation or ritual model in which they had been initiated. When they eventually set up a new house, they would carry on the ritual technology and nation identity inherited by initiation. However, for various reasons, an individual can be partially or sequentially initiated by priests of different nations. This person can then declare to have 'changed nations' (troca de nação) or alternatively assert affiliation to entangled spiritual lineages or to multiple nations. If the one who endures new initiation is already the leader of a congregation and proper additional rituals are conducted, it is said that the house, rather than the individual, has changed nations. In exceptional cases when formal initiation is absent, a priest or priestess can claim the gods' gift, through personal inspiration or mediumship, to justify new esoteric knowledge and the adsorption to a given nation. These possibilities can produce highly eclectic and idiosyncratic permutations leading a house to identify, for example, as 'Keto-Angola-Ijexá'.