Roles and community terms
Padrinho and Madrinha ("godfather" and "godmother") name the male and female spiritual leaders of a Santo Daime community, while an afilhado or afilhada is a spiritual godchild bound to one of them by a teacher-student relationship. Daimista simply means a practitioner of Santo Daime, and fardado or fardada refers to an initiated member entitled to wear the uniform, or farda, during works. Mestre, "master," is a title of respect used above all for Irineu Serra, the doctrine's founder.
Other terms describe roles within a given ceremony rather than standing status: a fiscal is a member responsible for helping others and seeing that the customary order of a work is kept, and an estado maior refers collectively to the more experienced fardados who carry particular responsibilities during a work.
Ritual language
A hinário is both a bound book of hymns and, by extension, the all-night celebration built around singing through one in full. A concentração is a shorter, seated meditative gathering held on fixed dates each month. Feitio names the multi-day communal process of preparing the sacrament, carried out in a dedicated building called the Casa do Feitio, and terms like raspação (scraping the vine) and apuração or apuro (the stage at which the preparation becomes active) describe particular stages of that process rather than instructions for it.
Miração, covered in its own entry, is the visionary state the sacrament can open; bailado is the choreographed collective dance performed during works, guided by the rhythm of maracas.
Names carried from other traditions
Many hymns and teachings invoke figures from outside Santo Daime's own founding vision. Catholic saints appear throughout — Saint George, Saint Sebastian, Saint John, Mary under titles like Nossa Senhora da Conceição — alongside Orixás from Umbanda and Candomblé, such as Iemanjá, Iansã, and Exú, and spirit guides drawn from Brazilian spiritism and indigenous lore, like the caboclo. Each of these belongs first to its own tradition; Santo Daime's hymns and vocabulary reference them rather than originate them, and where a hymn line pairs a saint with an Orixá, it is naming a syncretism that developed in wider Brazilian religious culture, not a claim that the two are identical.