Santo Daime ritual is conducted in works, trabalhos, which run for several hours and follow set forms. In a concentration work the congregation sits in silence for long stretches between hymns. In a dancing work, held on the church's festival dates, members in white uniform move in disciplined step in rows while a complete collection of hymns is sung through. A separate ritual, the feitio, is the making of the drink itself: the vine is pounded and the leaves gathered and the brew cooked over days, with hymns sung throughout, and participation in it is treated as a religious act rather than as preparation for one.
The hymns are the doctrine's teaching. Members receive them individually, understand them as given rather than composed, and gather them into personal collections; the founder's own collection is the central one. Those texts are the property of the churches and their authors and are in copyright, so this entry describes what they are and how they are used and does not reproduce them.
Since the founder's death the doctrine has run in two main lines. The Alto Santo line, in Rio Branco, kept to local practice and did not seek to expand. A second line formed around Sebastiao Mota de Melo, who established the forest settlement of Ceu do Mapia and encouraged the doctrine's spread first to Brazilian cities and then abroad, and it is this branch that accounts for most of the churches outside Brazil. The two differ on expansion, on some ritual details, and on the use of other substances alongside the tea, and members of each regard their own as the founder's.