Barquinha

The name means little boat, and the image is not decorative. A Barquinha house is understood as a vessel, those who work in it as its crew, and the work itself as a voyage undertaken on behalf of souls, the dead included. The founder had been a sailor before he was a barber, which is the explanation usually given for where the imagery came from, and the tradition explains its own origin through a book shown to him in a vision, blue, holding the doctrine he was to establish. A doctrine received rather than composed is a claim the other two Brazilian ayahuasca religions also make in their own way, and here it is made about a book.

Three things distinguish a work from what a visitor might expect after reading about Santo Daime. The Catholic liturgical year is followed closely, with festivals kept for Saint John, Saint Sebastian and the Immaculate Conception, and the calendar carries more weight here than in either of the others. Spirits are incorporated, in the manner familiar from Umbanda and Brazilian spiritism, with the caboclo and the preto velho among the figures received. And a substantial part of what a house does is charitable and physical: feeding people, treating them, and burying them.

That last point is easy to skip past and it is central. The Barquinha is not organised around a hymnal alone or a doctrine alone. A house is a working charity in a poor city, and the spiritual voyage and the practical relief of the neighbourhood are described as the same activity rather than as a religious duty and a social one. Any account of the tradition that leaves it out has described the ceremonies and missed the mission.

Three ayahuasca religions were founded in western Brazil inside about twenty five years, in the same small region, among people of similar background, and all three by Black Brazilians of north eastern origin. Because the sacrament is shared and the founders knew of one another, outside accounts sometimes present the Barquinha as a branch of Santo Daime. It is not held that way here, and it is not held that way by the people in it, who describe the three as separate religions rather than as denominations of one thing.

The atlas follows that reading for a reason that goes beyond deference. The three differ on the questions a tradition is actually organised around. Santo Daime works through a growing corpus of received hymns sung in uniform in a fixed order. The Uniao do Vegetal has no hymnal of that kind at all, and doctrine is delivered orally by a master answering questions. The Barquinha keeps the hymns and then adds the Catholic festival calendar, the incorporation of spirits and the charitable mission, none of which is a variation in emphasis. Movement between the three is uncommon.

What the Barquinha does not have is reach or a literature. It remains small and concentrated in Acre while the other two have congregations abroad, and most of what has been written about it is recent Brazilian scholarship with little in English. That imbalance is worth naming, because it is the reason a tradition that any specialist treats as one of three is the one a general reader has never heard of. The atlas describes it, as it describes any living tradition, without instructing anyone in it and without recommending it.