Santo Daime

The name of the church is a request. Dai-me is Portuguese for give me, and the phrases that recur through the hymns ask for strength, for love, for light. Members took the word for the drink and then for the doctrine itself, so that Daime names the tea, the tradition and the petition at the same time.

Raimundo Irineu Serra was born in Maranhao in 1892, the son of formerly enslaved parents, and travelled to the Acre territory as a young man during the rubber boom. He met ayahuasca in the border country between Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, where mestizo and indigenous vegetalismo practice was already long established, and the visions he received there, of a female figure he understood as the Virgin Mary and called the Queen of the Forest, are the founding account the church gives of itself. He began holding works in Rio Branco in the 1930s, gathered a community around him at Alto Santo, and led it until his death in 1971.

What he assembled was genuinely new rather than a rebranding of an existing practice. Amazonian plant knowledge supplied the tea and the discipline of using it; popular Brazilian Catholicism supplied the saints, the Virgin and the calendar; Afro-Brazilian religion and Kardecist Spiritism supplied a working account of spirits and of mediumship. Scholars of the movement treat it as one of the clearest examples anywhere of a religion whose formation can be followed in detail, because it happened recently enough to be documented and remembered.

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.