Santo Daime Ayahuasca

Santo Daime is a Christian religion that took shape in the 1930s in Acre, on Brazil's western Amazon frontier. Its founder, Raimundo Irineu Serra, was a descendant of enslaved people from the northeastern state of Maranhão. He came to the region as a young man looking for work as a rubber tapper. Its members drink ayahuasca, a brew of a forest vine and the leaves of a shrub that Indigenous and mestizo peoples of the region had long used. They call it Daime. In Portuguese the word sounds like dai-me, "give me," as in the invocations that run through the religion's hymns: give me light, give me strength, give me love. People drink it standing in rows, often through the night, singing hymns they believe were received from the spiritual world. They seek healing, teaching, and closeness to God. [1, 8]

A Vision in the Forest

Irineu Serra first drank ayahuasca around 1914, near the borders with Bolivia and Peru, after two brothers from his home region introduced him to it. According to the accounts his followers tell, he soon went alone into the forest for eight days. There he drank the brew, ate only unsalted manioc, and avoided speaking to anyone. During this retreat he saw the moon approach with an eagle at its center, and from within the moon a woman appeared. At first she was called Clara; later she was known as the Queen of the Forest and Our Lady of Conception. She gave him a mission. His first hymn, "White Moon," refers to the vision, and the moon and eagle became lasting symbols of the religion. [1, 8]

The pattern was a familiar one in the region. Mestizo healers known as vegetalistas also withdrew into the forest, kept strict diets, and said they learned directly from the spirits of "teacher plants," each of which was believed to have a protective "mother." Irineu Serra's Queen of the Forest fits that tradition, but he understood her as the Virgin Mary. The identification may have mattered: his doctrine left no room for the magical attacks, "darts," and love charms of vegetalista practice, whose healers could be feared for their power to harm as well as to heal. [8]

Irineu Serra moved to Rio Branco in 1920 and served in the territorial police force until 1932. On May 26, 1930, the first official work, or trabalho, took place in his home, with two other people present. His healing reputation drew others: first from Rio Branco's Black community, later from other groups, and eventually from members of the local elite. By then he was known as Mestre Irineu. [1, 2, 8]

He did not insist on a new label for himself. After his death, his widow corrected a man who called himself a daimista. She said she preferred the term the Mestre used for himself: uasqueiro, an ayahuasca drinker. [1, 2, 8]

The Teacher in the Cup

For Daimistas, ayahuasca is not a substance that produces an experience. It is a divine being. The presence within it is called Juramidam and is understood as the spirit of Christ. Around 1970, a São Paulo esoteric organization with which Mestre Irineu's group had been affiliated objected to the drink being served at its meetings. He replied, "If they don't want my Daime they also don't want me. I am the Daime and the Daime is me." [1]

The Daime is also a teacher. One elder who had followed Mestre Irineu since the 1960s put it plainly: "The Daime is the teacher. Whoever takes Daime and asks to learn, it teaches." A hymn sung in southern Brazil calls it "the teacher of teachers" and "the Master of all teachings." [2, 9]

The teaching arrives in two forms. One is the miração, the visionary experience the drink can bring. Daimistas are at times reluctant to describe their mirações, and the reports that have been collected stress that they are not static pictures. They can include unfolding geometric patterns, encounters with spiritual beings, travels to other realms, and the natural world seen shining with divine light. A researcher in southern Brazil noted that miração means more than seeing. It can involve hearing, touch, smell, and taste, and it carries emotional weight. [1, 9]

The other form is the hymn. Hymns are said to be "received" from the astral, the higher spiritual plane, by Mestre Irineu and, later, by others. His collection, O Cruzeiro (The Cross), is the foundation of the doctrine, and its final hymns are sung at the close of many works as a summary of his teaching. Some Daimistas speak of the hymns as a Third Testament. The religion's core principles of Harmony, Love, Truth, and Justice come from these hymns and from its early esoteric affiliation. Daimistas say theirs is a "musical doctrine" whose hymns show their full strength only when sung under the effect of the drink. [1, 8, 9]

Works, Uniforms, and the Current

Ayahuasca and hymn come together in the work. The major festival works mark Catholic holidays, the birthdays of elders, and other occasions for celebration. They begin in the evening and can last six to twelve hours. Initiated members, called fardados, "the uniformed ones," wear white: long pleated skirts and simple tiaras for women, and white suits with a navy tie for men. Everyone stands in assigned rows around a central table that holds a double-armed cross, men on one side and women on the other, arranged by height, age, and marital status. They dance simple steps back and forth, shaking rattles and singing. Daimistas believe that a "current" of force forms and circulates through the room, both around the table and downward from the astral. A person who leaves their place must follow a set route so as not to cut it. [1, 8]

The order is strict, and its insistence on small details often irritates newcomers. When the researcher MacRae observed the religion around 1990, participants were expected to avoid sex and alcohol for three days before and after a work. Newcomers attended an explanatory talk first. Experienced members served as "guardians" who helped anyone in difficulty, including those who vomited, a common effect of the drink. One church leader described an all-night work this way: "It's the great opportunity for cleansing and transformation, where all, in brotherhood, standing shoulder to shoulder in the current of energy, spend up to twelve hours singing and voyaging internally." At dawn, he wrote, come "happiness, the Sun rising, an embrace, the blessing, the hand shake, many questions answered." [8]

Other works are quieter. On the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month, members hold a concentração, a seated session built around a long period of complete silence. The Holy Mass is sung for the dead without instruments or dancing; the Alto Santo line does not drink Daime at the Mass. The preparation of the drink, called the feitio, is itself a ritual and is often considered the most important one, because every other work depends on it. [1, 8]

Illness, Merit, and the Spiritual Cure

Healing has been central from the start. Mestre Irineu sometimes recommended the Daime as a remedy. Followers also say he used it to discover remedies, learning in a miração which herbs would treat a particular illness. Most Daimistas understand illness, physical or mental, as the outward sign of a spiritual imbalance, which they trace to actions in past lives or to a person's present state of mind. [1, 2]

Many of the religion's founding figures arrived as patients. Sebastião Mota de Melo, a rubber tapper and Spiritist healer from Amazonas, came to Mestre Irineu in 1965 with a chronic liver illness. During a single session he saw himself outside his body while two men "resplendent like fire" removed his organs and extracted "three nail-sized insects" they said had caused his illness. He became one of Mestre Irineu's leading disciples. Earlier, in 1962, a merchant whose eldest son was gravely ill had come to the founder after doctors in Rio Branco and Afro-Brazilian healers had failed. The family say the son was cured on the night of São João. The merchant later said he himself was not healed by his first Daime "because he was very full of wickedness." With his second, he watched in a miração as he was operated on spiritually. [1, 2]

Mestre Irineu later gave that merchant charge of the Daime in town, so that sick people who could not make the journey to his rural center would still have access to it. The instructions, as the man recalled them in 1993, became a rule for the healing house that grew from this mission: "Do not offer Daime to anyone, but do not refuse anyone who seeks it." If a sick person could not come, he was to go to them, give the Daime, "and give at least two hours of assistance." His own rules for healing works were spare. The sick person is not touched. Someone who falls unconscious is only kept comfortable, "because often they are receiving a cure or an operation." Nobody drinks water during the work, "because it cuts the miração." In the 2000s and 2010s that house hosted dozens of people who stayed to work in exchange for meals, most of them seeking help with dependence on alcohol or other drugs. [2]

In this understanding, a cure is not always the removal of symptoms. Around 2008, the leader of a church in southern Brazil said that "99% of the people who come to the Daime come with spiritual problems." He described illness under a "Law of Merit": illness is something a person "has to go through in this life," and cure, too, is something one comes to deserve. He told of a young man with terminal cancer who regained weight over several works. During one session, the young man and his mother saw at the same moment that he was going to die. "The Daime changed my head," the young man said. "What God has for me, I receive." After his death, the leader said, his family saw him at a work, dressed in white. He had not been cured in the body, the leader explained, but had received "the spiritual cure." [9]

The difficult parts of the experience belong to this process. Daimistas call physical distress, vomiting, and sudden fear the peia, a word meaning a whipping or a punishment, and understand it as cleansing and discipline. One woman at the same church said she had found release from long sorrow through visions of past lives. "In the Daime it's like this," she said. "Everything is wrong and everything is right. … At first you don't understand what you feel. The understanding comes later." [9]

Two Lines After the Founder

After Mestre Irineu died in 1971, disputes over leadership divided his followers. People now usually speak of two main lines. Alto Santo, the cluster of churches that descend from his original center, remains in Acre and keeps no branches. CEFLURIS, founded by Padrinho Sebastião's group after a break in 1973–74, became the larger and more eclectic line. In 1980 Padrinho Sebastião led followers deeper into the forest. After a company claimed the first settlement, they moved again in 1983, this time to a tributary of the Purus River, where they founded Céu do Mapiá. He and his son spoke of building a New Jerusalem in the forest. [1, 2, 8]

The lines differ over mediumship. Mestre Irineu gradually moved away from spirit possession. Alto Santo still disapproves of it, and one early follower recalled that Mestre Irineu "was completely against incorporation, because the Daime doesn't send anyone to tell you; it shows you itself." CEFLURIS, by contrast, increasingly took in influences from the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda, including works in which mediums receive "suffering spirits" who come seeking charity. Starting in the mid-1970s, Padrinho Sebastião also used cannabis, which he called Santa Maria, as a feminine counterpart to the Daime. Police raids followed, and CEFLURIS eventually stopped approving it for ritual use. [1, 2, 8]

CEFLURIS also spread far beyond the forest. In the 1970s, young travelers from Brazil's southern cities reached Padrinho Sebastião's community and carried the doctrine home. The first church outside the Amazon opened in Rio de Janeiro in 1982, and others followed in Europe, Japan, and the United States. The newcomers changed the religion in turn. In 1989 MacRae observed that urban Daimistas had largely stopped using tobacco, which had once played a role in the tradition. On the canoe journey to Mapiá, visitors from the south marveled at the river dolphins, while local people regarded the animals as a bad omen. At Mapiá, where local eating habits prevailed, people joked that the way to call someone boring was to call them "macrobiotic." [1, 8]

Law and Heritage

In 1985, a division of Brazil's Health Ministry put the ayahuasca vine on the list of banned substances without consulting the federal narcotics council. The council's working group visited Santo Daime and União do Vegetal communities and drank the brew themselves. It found that decades of religious use had caused no noticeable social harm, and that members' moral standards were, if anything, "particularly rigid." The ban was lifted in 1987. A later resolution, which became binding in 2010, set norms for religious use that the ayahuasca religions had drafted with researchers. It forbade selling the drink and restricted use to religious purposes, recommending that therapeutic use stay on hold until its safety could be tested. At a congressional hearing that year, a federal judge who had led the drafting group defended the resolution. At the same hearing, a health regulator said more studies were needed and warned of risks for minors, older people, and people with mental disorders. In the United States, a 2009 federal ruling barred penalties for Santo Daime's sacramental use in Oregon. In 2013 it was described as legal in the Netherlands and contested in several other countries. [1, 2, 6]

Since 2008 the question has shifted from drugs to culture. Alto Santo, together with Barquinha and União do Vegetal, asked the national heritage institute to recognize the religious use of ayahuasca as part of Brazil's cultural heritage. The institute declined. CEFLURIS, now called ICEFLU, objected that it had not been consulted and that Indigenous peoples had been left out. Indigenous leaders in Acre have since claimed the role of the drink's original keepers. They question the "traditional" label given to the religions and ask what knowledge should be shared with outsiders at all. [7]

The Present

ICEFLU marked fifty years in 2024 and took "integration" as its watchword for the year. Its newsletter from that period reported regional preparation gatherings, a mental-health department for member churches, and a working group of uniformed women from 32 churches who met to discuss violence against women in their own communities. The group described such situations as "unfortunately common in our spaces, as in all of society." Céu do Mapiá has around a thousand residents. In May 2026, the community marked the death of the widow of Padrinho Sebastião, whom it called its matriarch, a year after it had celebrated her hundredth birthday. [3, 4, 10]

At Alto Santo, the founder's widow continues to keep his original center. In January 2026, Rio Branco formally declared the center an entity of public utility, and his small wooden house is being restored as a memorial. A member of the community stressed that the founder's hymns speak of a "Free Center," a "House of Knowledge," and the "House of the Queen of the Forest," but never of a church. "He didn't create churches," he said. "He founded an esoteric center, so much so that to this day we are forbidden, by a service decree left by the founder, to invite people to take part in hinários or concentration sessions." [5]

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