Raimundo Irineu Serra

Santo Daime has no book. What it has instead is a body of hymns, and the hymns do the work that scripture does elsewhere: they carry the doctrine, they order the service, and they are treated as received rather than composed. Mestre Irineu held that his own set, known as O Cruzeiro, was given to him rather than written by him, and later leaders and ordinary members have received hymns in the same way, so the corpus grows. A work, which is what a service is called, follows a fixed form. Participants wear a uniform, stand or sit in a marked arrangement by sex and by seniority, and sing through a hymnal in order, sometimes for many hours; some works are danced in place to a simple step with maracas, others are held seated in silence.

The vocabulary is Catholic, with the Virgin, Christ and the saints named throughout, and the discipline is deliberately strict, because concentration is understood as the thing that makes the experience useful rather than merely overwhelming. The atlas describes this because Santo Daime is a public religion with published hymnals and open churches. It does not set out how the sacrament is prepared or taken, which is a matter for its own communities and their legal position in each country.

The three Amazonian ayahuasca religions all begin in the same place, and it is not a spiritual one. Between about 1880 and 1912 the Amazon rubber boom pulled tens of thousands of workers, most of them from the drought-stricken north east of Brazil and many of them Black, into Acre and the western forest on debt contracts they could rarely discharge. When plantation rubber from South East Asia collapsed the price after 1912, the system emptied out and left those people where they were: far from home, without land, without the church structures of the coast, and in daily contact with Amerindian and mestizo neighbours who had their own healing practices.

Irineu Serra arrived at the end of the boom and lived through the aftermath. What he built at Alto Santo was a congregation for exactly that population, organised with the ranks and uniforms of a fraternal order, providing mutual aid and healing as well as doctrine. The Barquinha of Daniel Pereira de Mattos and the União do Vegetal of José Gabriel da Costa answered the same situation in different ways. Reading these religions as exotic imports from the forest misses what they mainly are, which is the religious response of a specific displaced labour force to its own circumstances.