Mestre Gabriel and the Union of Two Plants

The church's name is a statement about chemistry and about theology at the same time. União do Vegetal means the union of the plant, and it points at the fact that neither of the two plants used does anything much on its own. The mariri vine and the leaves of chacrona have to be combined and cooked together, and it is that union that produces the tea the church calls Hoasca or Vegetal. Members drink it in seated sessions and describe its purpose as mental concentration rather than vision for its own sake.

José Gabriel da Costa was born in Bahia in 1922 and went to the Amazon to work in the rubber trade, which is the same economic movement of people that brought the founder of Santo Daime to Acre a generation earlier. He first drank the tea in the border country, and on 22 July 1961 he gathered a group for a preparation and declared the União do Vegetal formed. That date is the church's own and is not in dispute; where accounts differ is the place, some giving a rubber camp near the Bolivian frontier and others the town of Porto Velho.

The structure he left is unusually formal for a movement of that origin. Teaching is oral, delivered in session through question and answer, and authority runs through a graded body of masters. Local centres, called nuclei, are administratively distinct but doctrinally uniform, and the headquarters is in Brasilia. That organisation is a large part of why the church was able to present itself successfully to regulators and to courts.