Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions

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The Brazilian ayahuasca religions are a cluster of new religious movements that arose in the western Amazon during the twentieth century, distinguished by the ritual drinking of ayahuasca — a bitter brew of forest plants — as the central sacrament of a faith otherwise built from Catholic, spiritist, and indigenous elements. Three churches are usually named together: Santo Daime, the União do Vegetal, and Barquinha. They share the brew and little of their organization, and each tells its own story of how the drink came to be received as holy.

The oldest line traces to Raimundo Irineu Serra, a Black migrant from Maranhão who worked the rubber routes of Acre and, in the 1930s, began holding services around the brew he called Daime — from the Portuguese dai-me, “give me,” as in give me light, give me love. His followers built the tradition that became Santo Daime, organized around hymns received, the practitioners hold, directly in vision, and around a calendar of works in which the congregation sings and stands for hours together. Barquinha, founded in Rio Branco by Daniel Pereira de Mattos in the 1940s, grew from the same Acrean soil but leaned harder toward Brazilian spiritism and the veneration of charitable spirits. The União do Vegetal is distinct in origin and temper: founded in 1961 by José Gabriel da Costa, it is more centralized and restrained, calls the brew hoasca or vegetal, and frames its work as the recovery of memory and the cultivation of mental clarity.

What the brew contains has made these churches a matter of law as well as faith. Ayahuasca combines a plant carrying the visionary compound DMT with a vine whose alkaloids allow that compound to act when drunk; the resulting states — long, sometimes overwhelming, often accompanied by purging the traditions read as cleansing — are taken by members not as intoxication but as encounter. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century courts in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere have repeatedly weighed that claim against drug law, and several have granted these churches legal protection for sacramental use, treating the rite as religion rather than recreation.

The movements are frequently described as syncretic, and the description is accurate as far as it goes. They braid the saints and the Virgin of folk Catholicism, the disincarnate spirits of Kardecist spiritism, and the plant knowledge of Amazonian vegetalismo into liturgies that hold these strands without dissolving them. From the late twentieth century the churches spread well beyond the Amazon — to southern Brazilian cities, then to Europe and North America — carrying the brew into legal and cultural settings far from the rubber camps where the first hymns were sung. In that move the question of fidelity became a practical one, and the movements have governed it differently: some hold the rite to its received form, others let it adapt to the new ground.

→ Related: Spiritism · Syncretism · Reincarnation