Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Hymns as Scripture, and the Shape of a Work

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Hymns as Scripture, and the Shape of a Work

Santo Daime has no book. What it has instead is a body of hymns, and the hymns do the work that scripture does elsewhere: they carry the doctrine, they order the service, and they are treated as received rather than composed. Mestre Irineu held that his own set, known as O Cruzeiro, was given to him rather than written by him, and later leaders and ordinary members have received hymns in the same way, so the corpus grows. A work, which is what a service is called, follows a fixed form. Participants wear a uniform, stand or sit in a marked arrangement by sex and by seniority, and sing through a hymnal in order, sometimes for many hours; some works are danced in place to a simple step with maracas, others are held seated in silence.

The vocabulary is Catholic, with the Virgin, Christ and the saints named throughout, and the discipline is deliberately strict, because concentration is understood as the thing that makes the experience useful rather than merely overwhelming. The atlas describes this because Santo Daime is a public religion with published hymnals and open churches. It does not set out how the sacrament is prepared or taken, which is a matter for its own communities and their legal position in each country.

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