Sebastião Mota de Melo

In 1983 Sebastião Mota de Melo led a group of families deep into the forest of Amazonas state, to a site on the Igarapé Mapiá, a tributary of the Purus, days from the nearest town. What they built there was not a mission station but a village: houses, gardens, a school, a clinic, and at its centre a hexagonal church for the works. Céu do Mapiá was conceived as a community in which the religious life and the ordinary one would not be separable, and it remains the headquarters of the CEFLURIS line of Santo Daime and a destination for members travelling from Brazilian cities and from abroad. The move was a considerable act of organisation and also a considerable risk, and it followed an earlier stage at Colônia Cinco Mil outside Rio Branco.

Under Padrinho Sebastião the tradition also changed. He brought in Kardecist spiritism and material from Umbanda, received a large body of hymns of his own, and accepted urban Brazilians and then foreign visitors into the works. The older Alto Santo community, which kept to what Mestre Irineu had left, regards those developments as additions rather than inheritance, and the two lines have remained distinct. The village sits deep inside protected federal forest, so its legal existence has been bound up with Brazilian land and forest policy as well as with religious freedom, and the two questions have travelled together ever since.

Almost every Santo Daime church outside Brazil traces its authority through CEFLURIS and therefore through Padrinho Sebastião. The opening began in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Brazilian city dwellers, some of them from the counterculture, began travelling to Acre and then to Mapiá, and continued through his son Alfredo Gregório de Melo and others who received visitors and later travelled themselves.

By the 1990s there were congregations in Europe, North America and Japan. That expansion produced the legal history the tradition is now best known for outside its own membership: prosecutions and licensing disputes in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the United States and elsewhere, turning on whether a religious body may import and use a preparation containing a controlled substance. Outcomes have differed sharply between jurisdictions and the position is still unsettled in several. Padrinho Sebastião himself did not travel to any of these countries; he died in Rio de Janeiro in January 1990, while receiving treatment, at the point where the movement he led was beginning to become international. What he left was a village, a hymnal, a line of succession and a set of arguments that are still running.