While the Jeje vodum practices seem to have been dominant in the early stages of Candomblé formation, by the end of the nineteenth century, in sync with the Yoruba ethnogenesis in West Africa, promoted across the Atlantic by an elite of African merchants, the Nagô visibility within Candomblé became paramount, attracting the attention of early scholars (Matory, 2005; Parés, 2005). The agency of religious leaders combined with the influence of intellectuals and the media (since the 1930s and more noticeably since the 1970s) led the most famous Nagô-Keto houses in Bahia to be regarded as the true guardians of African tradition and authenticity. Also, since the 1980s they were used as important icons of resistance, pride, and dignity in the political antiracist agenda of the black social movements. By these means the Nagô-Keto nation emerged as an emblem of prestige and religious authority, often opposed to the syncretism of the Angola nation. Because of this, and to legitimize their practices, many congregations of recent foundation with no affiliation to the 'traditional' Keto houses chose to self-identify as belonging to this nation and to follow its ritual model. This would explain the above-mentioned rise of the Keto houses in  
Salvador (Dantas, 1988; Parés, 2005). Moreover, it is worth noting that the ideological opposition between the Nagô devotional 'religion', associated with ideas of ritual purity, and the Angola egotistic 'magic', associated with notions of mixture and witchcraft, finds a parallelism in Cuba's contrast between the Santeria (reglas de Arará and Ocha) and the Palo (Monte, Mayombé, Congo), and perhaps in Haiti, between the Rada nachon and the Pweto nachon.