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. All three were born in the same narrow stretch of country — the rubber territory of Acre and Rondônia, on the frontier where Brazil meets Peru and Bolivia — and all three were the work of poor migrants, most of them Black, who had gone west for the latex boom and stayed to make something out of what the forest gave them. What they made was not a survival of indigenous practice and not a transplant of any European church, but a third thing: a liturgy in Portuguese, sung to a Christian God, taken in a state opened by a plant the Amazon had been using long before any of them arrived.

The Banisteriopsis caapi vine — called mariri or jagube in the churches — the woody liana that is one of the two plants combined to make the sacramental brew. — Terpsichore, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Santo Daime: the hymns received in vision

The oldest line traces to Raimundo Irineu Serra, born 15 December 1892 in São Vicente Ferrer, in the northeastern state of Maranhão, the son of freed slaves and raised in the folk Catholicism of the rural northeast. Like tens of thousands of nordestinos he migrated west to the rubber camps of Acre, where he tapped latex and, in the 1920s, drank ayahuasca for the first time among the indigenous and mestizo users of the upper Amazon. The tradition holds that in a sequence of these sessions a feminine divinity appeared to him — seen within or beside the moon and identified as the Queen of the Forest, whom he understood as the Virgin, Our Lady of Conception — and that she gave him the doctrine and the authority to lead. He named the brew Daime, from the Portuguese dai-me, “give me,” the petition a drinker makes within the work: give me light, give me love, give me strength. From around 1930 he held services around it in Rio Branco; in 1945 he received the land at Alto Santo that became the first community, and he organized his followers as the Centro de Iluminação Cristã Luz Universal — the Center of Universal Light Christian Illumination.

The form he gave the religion is its signature. The doctrine arrives as hymns (hinos), which the practitioners hold are not composed but received — given directly in the visionary state and transcribed afterward, so that authorship belongs to the spiritual world and the singer is a channel. Irineu’s own collection, the hinário called O Cruzeiro, is the founding text of the tradition; later masters received their own hinários, and a Daime work is built of these hymns sung in sequence. The principal works are not seated and silent but danced: the congregation stands in disciplined rows, men and women apart, and performs the bailado, a measured two- and three-step swaying maraca rhythm held for many hours through a fixed calendar of works keyed to the Catholic and agricultural year — concentration works at the new and full moon, festal hinários on the saints’ days and at Christmas. The labor of the rite is part of its meaning: to stand, sing, and keep the step through the long hours of the brew’s action is itself the discipline.

Irineu died on 6 July 1971, and the tradition divided over the question of fidelity. One line, centered at Alto Santo, held the works close to the form he had left. Another, gathered around Sebastião Mota de Melo — Padrinho Sebastião — moved toward a more eclectic practice, taking in elements of spiritism, Umbanda, and esoteric currents, and founded a separate body, the Centro Eclético da Fluente Luz Universal Raimundo Irineu Serra (CEFLURIS), around 1974; its people built the forest settlement of Céu do Mapiá deep in Amazonas. It was largely this eclectic line that carried Santo Daime out of the Amazon in the 1980s and 1990s — to the cities of southern Brazil and then to Europe and North America — while the Alto Santo line remained the conservative pole. The division is not a schism over God but over the received form: what may change and what may not when the work travels.

Barquinha: the little boat and the charitable dead

Barquinha grew from the same Acrean soil and from the same circle. Its founder, Daniel Pereira de Mattos, was also a Black migrant from Maranhão who had reached Acre early in the century — by some accounts a former marine and later a barber — and who knew Irineu and drank with him through the 1930s before receiving his own mission. In 1945, in Rio Branco, he founded what became the Centro Espírita e Culto de Oração Casa de Jesus Fonte de Luz — the Spiritist Center and Prayer Cult, House of Jesus, Source of Light — known familiarly as the Barquinha, the “little boat,” the vessel that carries souls. Of the three traditions it leans hardest toward spiritism: its cosmos is densely peopled with charitable spirits — caboclos, pretos-velhos (the spirits of old enslaved Africans), encantados, and the saints — who descend in the works to heal and to counsel, and its devotional life is built around charity, processions, and a heavy Catholic liturgical frame of masses and prayer. Its hymns are gathered in the Livro Azul, the Blue Book. Daniel also drew on a thread of European esotericism that had reached the Amazon through mail-order pamphlet societies — the Círculo Esotérico da Comunhão do Pensamento and Rosicrucian materials — so that the Barquinha braids more strands than either sister tradition. After Daniel’s death his works passed in January 1959 to Antônio Geraldo da Silva, and the tradition has remained the smallest and most regionally rooted of the three, concentrated in and around Rio Branco.

The União do Vegetal: memory and mental clarity

The União do Vegetal is distinct in origin and in temper. Its founder, José Gabriel da Costa — Mestre Gabriel — was born in 1922 in the sertão of Bahia, not the rubber forest, and came to the Amazon as a migrant laborer; he first drank the brew in 1959, near the Bolivian border, in the company of a rubber tapper named Chico Lourenço. On 22 July 1961, in the forest of Rondônia, he founded the União do Vegetal — the Union of the Plant — with, in the movement’s own phrasing, the aim of bringing peace to the world. He called the brew hoasca or simply vegetal, made of the vine the tradition names mariri and the leaf it names chacrona. In 1965 he moved to Porto Velho and began to institutionalize the work, which was constituted in 1970 as the Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal (CEBUDV). He, too, died in 1971.

Where Santo Daime sings and dances, the UDV sits and listens. Its works are sober, seated, and verbal: the central act is the chamada, a sung call, and the leitura, the master’s spoken teaching, delivered in question-and-answer with the assembled members. The tradition is markedly more centralized and hierarchical than the others — a graded body of mestres under a governing council, a single recognized line of authority, and a guarded oral teaching rather than an open hymnal. Its doctrine is framed around reincarnation and the recovery of memory: the work is understood to restore knowledge the soul already carries from before this life, to clear the mind, and to cultivate what the tradition calls mental force — self-mastery, lucidity, ethical seriousness — rather than ecstatic vision for its own sake. This restraint, and the UDV’s careful, lawyerly relation to the state, would later make it the test case on which the legal standing of all the ayahuasca religions partly turned.

The brew and the reading of the experience

What the brew contains has made these churches a matter of law as well as faith. Ayahuasca combines a leaf carrying the visionary compound DMT with a vine whose β-carboline alkaloids inhibit the enzyme that would otherwise destroy that compound in the gut, so that taken together — and only together — the drink acts when swallowed.

Preparation of the brew: vine and leaf boiled down together over many hours, the labor-intensive process the Daime tradition calls the feitio. — Terpsichore, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The states it opens are long, sometimes overwhelming, and frequently accompanied by vomiting, which the traditions do not treat as a side effect but read as limpeza, a cleansing, the body expelling what the spirit must be rid of. Members take the experience not as intoxication but as encounter: a meeting with the divine, the dead, or the self, undergone under discipline and within a liturgy that tells the drinker what is happening and how to bear it. The distinction between the religious and the clinical reading of the same plant — encounter against pharmacology — is precisely the seam along which the modern scientific study of the brew has grown; that work, the trials and the neuroimaging and the long-term cohorts the churches have made available, is the subject of ayahuasca research and is left to it. Here the brew is sacrament, not specimen.

The syncretic braid

The movements are frequently described as syncretic, and the description is accurate as far as it goes — but syncretism here names a braid, not a blend. Three strands are held together without dissolving into one another. From folk Catholicism come the saints and the Virgin, Jesus and the Cross, the calendar of feasts, the sung prayer, and the Holy Spirit understood as the agent of illumination within the work; the whole architecture is recognizably Christian, and the founders presented their traditions as forms of Christianity, not departures from it. From Kardecist spiritism — the doctrine codified in 1850s France by Allan Kardec and naturalized in Brazil as espiritismo, dominant enough by the twentieth century to color the whole national religious field — come the reincarnation of the soul across many lives as the engine of moral progress, the disincarnate spirits who communicate through mediums, and the ethic of charity as the spirit’s central work; the strand is strongest in Barquinha and explicit in the UDV’s reincarnationism, and it is Kardec’s spiritism, not the distinct Anglo-American Spiritualism, that is meant. From Amazonian vegetalismo — the plant knowledge of indigenous and mestizo healers — come the brew itself, the figure of the plant as teacher, and the ritual grammar of the session. That these strands hold without collapsing is the distinctive achievement: a drinker in a Daime work may address a Catholic saint, expect a Kardecist spirit, and credit the plant, and feel no contradiction among the three.

The brew on trial

From the late twentieth century the churches spread well beyond the Amazon, carrying the brew into legal and cultural settings far from the rubber camps where the first hymns were sung — and into the reach of drug law, since the DMT the brew contains is a controlled substance almost everywhere. The legal history is, in consequence, a chain of cases in which courts were asked to distinguish a sacrament from a narcotic. In Brazil itself the question was settled early and in the churches’ favor: after a health agency listed the vine as a proscribed plant in 1985, the Federal Narcotics Council (CONFEN) convened a working group, visited the churches, suspended the prohibition in 1987, and in June 1992 ruled definitively that the religious use of the brew was lawful; the National Council on Drug Policy (CONAD) confirmed and regulated that use in a 2010 resolution that set ethical norms — sustainability of the plants, no commercialization, care around minors — without forbidding the rite.

Abroad, the decisive instance came in the United States. The federal government seized a shipment of hoasca bound for the American branch of the UDV and moved to bar its sacramental use under the Controlled Substances Act; the church sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. In Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, decided 21 February 2006, a unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the government had failed to show the compelling interest that the Act requires before it may substantially burden a sincere religious exercise, and upheld the church’s use of the tea. Three years later a federal court in Oregon, in Church of the Holy Light of the Queen v. Mukasey (2009), extended the same protection to a Santo Daime congregation, guided expressly by the UDV ruling. European courts have reached the question variously — an Amsterdam court acquitted a Santo Daime member in 2001 on religious-freedom grounds, while later rulings elsewhere have been less favorable — so the international picture is uneven. What the strongest of these decisions establish is a single principle the churches had always asserted of themselves: that the rite is religion and not recreation, and that the brew is taken for encounter and not for intoxication.

Scholarship and sources

The academic study of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions matured in the 1990s and 2000s, principally in Brazilian anthropology and the international study of new religious movements, and it treats the three churches as genuine modern religions rather than as drug subcultures. The anchor reference works are the edited collection by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Edward MacRae, Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil (Routledge/Equinox, 2010), and the companion volume on the traditions’ global diffusion, Labate and Henrik Jungaberle’s The Internationalization of Ayahuasca (LIT Verlag, 2011). MacRae’s ethnography of Santo Daime ritual and its social controls, Guided by the Moon (originally Guiado pela lua, 1992), is available in full through the Brazilian research network NEIP at neip.info; Andrew Dawson’s Santo Daime: A New World Religion (Bloomsbury, 2013) is the standard English-language monograph, and Sandra Goulart’s work treats the religious matrices of the UDV while Marcelo Mercante’s “The Barquinha” (Fieldwork in Religion, 2006) is the leading study of the smallest tradition. The legal literature turns on the primary documents: the unanimous opinion in Gonzales v. UDV, 546 U.S. 418 (2006), the Oregon decision in Church of the Holy Light of the Queen v. Mukasey, and the regulatory history cataloged by bodies such as ICEERS. The Kardecist strand that runs through all three traditions is documented in the scholarship on Brazilian espiritismo — David Hess, Bernardo Lewgoy, Emerson Giumbelli — which reads the national religious field these churches grew within.

In the move out of the Amazon the question of fidelity became a practical one, and the movements have governed it differently: some hold the rite to its received form, letting nothing change; others let it adapt to the new ground, trusting that the hymns will keep being received wherever the work is sung. The disagreement is old — it is the same disagreement that divided Alto Santo from Céu do Mapiá the year the first master died — and it travels with the brew, a piece of luggage as constant as the cup.

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