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The Ayahuasca Churches and the Courts

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The Ayahuasca Churches and the Courts

The twentieth century produced something in Amazonia that had not existed before: organised churches, with congregations, hymnals and constitutions, built around a plant preparation that had previously belonged to indigenous and mestizo specialists working one to one. Santo Daime was founded in the Brazilian state of Acre by Raimundo Irineu Serra, a rubber tapper of African descent, in the 1930s. Uniao do Vegetal was founded by Jose Gabriel da Costa in 1961. Both combine the Amazonian brew with Christian liturgy and a strongly congregational form of worship.

That congregational form is what carried the practice out of the basin. A church has members, officers, records and a doctrine that can be stated to an official, and those are the things a legal system can recognise. When Uniao do Vegetal's United States branch was blocked from importing its sacrament, the case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which held that the government had not carried the burden the Religious Freedom Restoration Act places on it of justifying the ban as applied to that congregation.

Two things follow that are easy to run together and should not be. The churches are genuinely Amazonian in origin and they are not the same thing as the indigenous practices that preceded them; a Shipibo healer's work and a Santo Daime service are related by ingredient and by region, not by lineage. And the legal protection won by a church with a written constitution does not extend to practices held by peoples who never organised themselves that way.

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