Three Traditions, One Region, Three Answers

Set the three Amazonian ayahuasca religions beside each other and the differences are sharper than the shared sacrament suggests. Santo Daime, from Mestre Irineu, is organised around a growing corpus of received hymns, sung in uniform in a fixed order, with a strongly Christian vocabulary and a strong discipline of concentration. The União do Vegetal, from Mestre Gabriel, has no hymnal of that kind: doctrine is oral, delivered by a master answering questions during a session, membership is graded, and the institutional style is careful, urban and legally cautious.

The Barquinha, from Daniel Pereira de Mattos, keeps the hymns but adds the Catholic festival calendar and the incorporation of spirits, and puts practical charity at the centre. All three began within about twenty five years of each other, in the same small region of western Brazil, among people of similar background, and all three were founded by Black Brazilians of north eastern origin. They are not branches of one another. They are three separate answers to the same question, worked out in the same place at the same time, and the differences between them are as informative as anything they hold in common. Movement between the three is not common, and members generally describe them as separate religions rather than as denominations of one, which is how the atlas records them.