A doctrine sung rather than written

A syncretic Christian tradition, in its own self-understanding rather than only in an observer's. Practitioners describe themselves less as adherents of a new religion than as Christians with access to an unusually powerful sacrament, and speak of a doctrine — a path — rather than a set of dogmas.

The sacrament is a drink made from two Amazonian plants: the vine jagube (Banisteriopsis caapi), also called cipó, and the leaf rainha (Psychotria viridis), also called chacrona. Mestre Irineu renamed it Daime in 1931, from the imperative dai-me — give me — that opens the prayer sung in the hymns: give me strength, give me love, give me light. Within the tradition it is understood not as a substance but as a teacher.

Everything else grows from that and from the hymns. Works last hours and sometimes most of a day. Members wear a uniform and stand in ranked lines. Prayers open and close every session, and the Catholic calendar sets the year.

Mestre Irineu was born in São Vicente Ferrer, Maranhão, in 1890 — the date on the baptismal registry, though he gave 1892 himself and the tradition has never fully settled it. He left home in his teens, worked his way into the Amazon, served on the Brazil–Peru boundary commission, and came to ayahuasca in Acre around 1914 through Antônio Costa, a fellow Maranhense, who had learned of it from a Peruvian ayahuasquero.

During a forest diet he saw a woman in the moon who gave him a hymn and the instruction to found a doctrine. He knew her first as the Queen of the Forest and later named her as Our Lady of the Conception. The first documented open work was held on May 26, 1930; the first hinário was sung on the vigil of Saint John in 1935; the dance came in 1936, after six months of rehearsal. He received his last hymn in December 1970 and died on July 6, 1971.

What met in that one lifetime was Brazilian popular Catholicism, Amazonian vegetalismo, the Afro-Brazilian religion of his Maranhão childhood, Kardecist Spiritism and the esoteric societies of São Paulo. Santo Daime is not a synthesis anyone designed. It is what happened.

Within ICEFLU and alongside it, individual churches are grouped under their own registered bodies — CEFLI at Fortaleza, CICLUMIG in Minas Gerais, CEFLURGEM, CEFLUSMME at Céu do Mar, CEFLULC at Teresópolis. The initials are administrative rather than doctrinal, and the hinário register records them because the documents themselves do.

The archive holds 178 hymnal and liturgical documents — 7,773 hymns and 266,043 lines of lyric, in Portuguese and English. Where a hymn exists in both languages the page gives you a toggle; where it exists in only one, it does not.

Where the sources disagree — about a date, a hymn count, the colour worn at a particular work — the pages say so rather than choosing quietly. There is a fair amount of that.