A split after the founder's death
Following the 1971 death of Mestre Irineu in Rio Branco, in Brazil's Acre state, leadership of the Santo Daime movement he founded splintered among several claimants. One of them, Sebastião Mota de Melo, known as Padrinho Sebastião, led a community called Colônia 5000 some distance from the original church, initially with Mestre Irineu's blessing to hold his own ceremonies. In 1974 he formally broke away and stopped sending Daime to the original church, straining relations between the two branches even before any dispute over cannabis arose.
New arrivals, new practices
Through the 1970s, young people drawn from Brazil's counterculture, associated with hippie and New Age currents of the period, began arriving at Amazonian Daime communities after hearing of the ayahuasca ceremonies held there. Padrinho Sebastião, unlike many other Daime leaders of the period, welcomed these newcomers into his community. Some had previously used cannabis and continued to do so quietly; historical accounts also describe a period in which Padrinho Sebastião studied psychoactive mushrooms found locally together with members of the community, before later setting that study aside.
The naming of Santa Maria
According to accounts from within the community, Padrinho Sebastião came to see cannabis as connected to the spiritual energy of the Virgin Mary, as distinct from the energy he associated with Christ and ayahuasca, and renamed the plant Santa Maria on that basis. He is recorded as describing this as an act of reclaiming the plant from an association with wrongdoing and restoring it to what he considered its proper spiritual role.
Legal history
The introduction of cannabis into Daime ritual brought the Colônia 5000 community into conflict with Brazilian authorities, including a 1981 raid in which religious materials were destroyed. A government commission subsequently examined the church's practices; ayahuasca use was formally recognized for religious purposes in Brazil in 1986, while ritual use of cannabis was not extended the same recognition. This is a specific historical and legal record from Brazil, not a statement about the legal status of cannabis in any other place or time.