Daniel Pereira de Mattos

The governing image of the Barquinha is a vessel. The centre is a boat, the members are its crew, the missionary work is a voyage, and the souls carried include the dead as well as the living. That image organises everything else. Services follow the Catholic calendar closely, with festivals for Saint John, Saint Sebastian and the Immaculate Conception, and the liturgical year matters more here than in either of the other two Amazonian traditions.

Hymns are received and sung as in Santo Daime, but the Barquinha also incorporates spirits in the manner familiar from Umbanda and Brazilian spiritism, including the caboclo and preto velho figures, and a considerable part of the work is charitable: feeding, treating and burying the poor of Rio Branco. Daniel Pereira de Mattos had been a sailor before he was anything else, which is usually offered as the origin of the imagery, and he came to the practice through the circle around Mestre Irineu before founding his own house in 1945.

The tradition remains small and largely confined to Acre. It is the least documented of the three, and most of what has been written about it is recent Brazilian scholarship rather than anything in English. Barquinha accounts also describe a blue book shown to the founder in a vision, holding the doctrine he was to establish, and that image of a book received rather than written sits at the centre of how the tradition explains its own origin.

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.