From Maranhão to Alto Santo

Maranhão

Born in the Baixada Maranhense two years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, to parents descended from enslaved people who worked the land.

1. 15 December 1890Raimundo Irineu Serra is born in rural São Vicente Ferrer, Maranhão.The baptismal registry gives 1890. Mestre himself gave 1892, and that is the year on his identity document — a discrepancy the tradition calls a questão dos dois anos, and one his widow declined to correct.
2. 22 March 1891Baptised in the main church of São Vicente Ferrer.
3. around 1905Leaves Maranhão in his mid-teens.Accounts differ: a quarrel with his uncle Paulo, or a romance with an older cousin opposed by his mother. Researchers and family record both.

Into the Amazon

He arrived during the collapse of the rubber boom, in a region shaped by debt-peonage and by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of northeasterners.

1. around 1909Reaches Belém, working some months as a gardener to pay his onward passage.
2. 1910 – 1912Serves on the Brazil–Peru boundary commission, becoming its treasurer.
3. 1912Arrives in Acre, settling first at Xapurí, then Brasileia.
4. around 1914 – 1916Completes a forest diet and receives the vision of Clara, the Queen of the Forest.The tradition holds he was initiated into ayahuasca in Peru or in the company of Antônio Costa. The sources hedge on the detail; the indigenous peoples of the region make their own claims of authorship, discussed below.
5. 1916The Centro de Regeneração e Fé is founded at Brasileia under the motto Harmonia, Amor e Verdade.The first ayahuasca centre associated with him. It ran until 1943, suspended between 1926 and 1936 under police pressure.

Rio Branco, and the doctrine takes form

The two decades in which the drink was named, the first hymns arrived, and the ritual acquired the shape it still has.

1. 2 January 1920Arrives in Rio Branco; days later joins the territorial police, serving as soldier and then corporal.
2. 26 May 1930The first documented open session — a work of concentration.
3. 1931Settles at Vila Ivonete and renames the drink Daime, from the Portuguese imperative dai-me, give me.
4. 1934Lua Branca is presented to the fraternity.Percília Matos da Silva entered the doctrine as a child around this time, when the hymnal held three hymns: Lua Branca, Tuperci and Ripi.
5. 23 June 1935The first hinário in Santo Daime history is sung, on the vigil of Saint John, at Maria Damião's house.
6. 1936The bailado is introduced — march, waltz and mazurka, danced in a quadrilateral formation with the maracá — after six months of rehearsal. The first fardas appear: white for hinários, blue for concentrations.
7. late 1930sThe two-barred Cross of Caravaca replaces the single-barred cross as the central symbol.
8. 1937He cures Daniel Pereira de Matos, who later founds the Barquinha — a separate path he kept in friendship.

Alto Santo

Persecution under laws that criminalised curandeirismo pushed the work out of the town and onto the land that still carries its name.

1. 1942Forty police raid his house; he is arrested on a charge of charlatanism.The sources describe a siege during a festival, a revolver held to his head, and release the following morning. This is recorded as the incident that decided the move.
2. 15 May 1945The community relocates about seven kilometres out to land renamed Alto da Santa Cruz, later shortened to Alto Santo.
3. 23 – 24 June 1945The first hinário at the new site is sung in the orange grove.
4. 1954An axe accident costs him the toes of his right foot. During six months of recovery he reads the Bible, the prayer book of the Cross of Caravaca and the magazines of the Esoteric Circle, and begins formulating the Table Work.
5. 15 September 1956Marries Peregrina Gomes Serra, who would lead the centre after his death.
6. 1957 – 1958His only return journey to Maranhão, after forty-six years away.
7. 1958Stringed instruments — guitar, banjo, mandolin, tambourine — are formally brought into the works.

The last years

A late body of hymns, a formal statute, and a succession that has never been settled between the two main lines.

1. 1961 – 1963Formal affiliation with the Círculo Esotérico da Comunhão do Pensamento, the São Paulo esoteric society that supplied the name CICLU.The sources give 1961 for member registration and 1963 for the centre's affiliation, and disagree about which is the date that matters.
2. 1965He heals Sebastião Mota de Melo, who had come to him with chronic liver disease.
3. 1968After a powerful batch of the sacrament he begins receiving the Hinos Novos. In the same year he authorises Sebastião Mota de Melo to establish a satellite group at Colônia Cinco Mil.
4. December 1970The final hymn is received.
5. 5 July 1971He approves the bylaws of CICLU — his last official act.
6. 6 July 1971Mestre Irineu dies at Alto Santo. O Cruzeiro is sung through in full that afternoon, seated and a capella. The funeral procession the next day numbered some three hundred people.
7. 1974Padrinho Sebastião founds CEFLURIS, later ICEFLU, after a rupture over how to answer official persecution.He continued to revere Mestre Irineu as the root of the work. The Alto Santo groups do not recognise him as the legitimate heir. Both positions are held sincerely and this site does not adjudicate between them.

What fed into it

Santo Daime is not a synthesis anyone designed. It is what happened when these currents met in one place, in one lifetime.

• Brazilian popular CatholicismThe prayers, the saints and their feast days, the rosary, the Mass for the departed.
• Amazonian vegetalismoThe forest diet, the sacrament itself, and the vocabulary the tradition renamed — jagube and rainha for the two plants.
• Afro-Brazilian religionPresent from Maranhão, and later formally allied with Umbanda in the ICEFLU line.
• Kardecist SpiritismMediumship, and the moral architecture of spiritual evolution.
• Esoteric societiesThe Esoteric Circle of São Paulo gave the centre its name, the Key of Harmony, and the motto of harmony, love, truth and justice.