An esoteric order for a wide membership
The CECP was founded by Antônio Olívio Rodrigues, a self-taught Portuguese migrant, and describes itself as a non-profit, altruistic order open to people of any religion, philosophy, sex, race, class, or nationality. It drew on esoteric currents that had developed in the United States and Europe during the nineteenth century, naming figures such as the Indian guru Swami Vivekananda among its patrons, and it organized local cells called Tattwas from as early as 1910, spreading rapidly among influential circles, particularly in São Paulo.
The order's core practice is what it calls "communion of thought": members vibrate together at set hours toward the ideals of Harmony, Love, Truth, and Justice, a formula that became a recurring liturgical element within Santo Daime. Its members were expected to be literate and to read extensively, a profile drawn largely from the urban middle class — in contrast to the CRF, described below, whose participants in remote Acre were mostly rubber tappers and laborers.
The Círculo de Regeneração e Fé as a remote cell
Sources describing the CECP's history place the Círculo de Regeneração e Fé (CRF), founded in the Acre frontier region in 1916 under the motto "Harmony, Love, and Truth," as one of its Tattwas, even though its membership looked nothing like the literate urban esotericists elsewhere in the order. The CRF's president, Antônio Raimundo Costa, and its other members — including a young Raimundo Irineu Serra — were rubber tappers, hunters, and farmers, many only partly literate.
CRF sessions combined ayahuasca consumption with mediumistic communication: participants received messages, described as psychographed, from entities addressed by titles such as king, queen, prince, or marshal, generally through the president. Members also adopted noble or military titles of their own, mirroring those given to the spirits, with ranks running from marshal down through general, major, and sergeant, and members reportedly wore a white uniform with blue trim marking these distinctions.
Hei de Vencer
The clearest surviving trace of the order in the doctrine is three words. Hei de Vencer — I shall overcome — was the motto of the Círculo Esotérico, and Mestre Irineu adopted it. It now stands over the entrance of daimista houses that differ from one another in a great deal else, which makes it one of the few things the whole tradition visibly shares, and a hundred years older than most of what it shares it with.
A second trace is an object. In 2006, at the house of Daniel Serra — Mestre Irineu's nephew — on the Estrada Apolônio Sales in Rio Branco, a copy of the CECP's Livro de Instruções belonging to Mestre Irineu was identified. The Livro de Instruções is the order's principal text, reserved to initiates and not circulated outside the membership; a member's copy passes to family or by bequest, and those who receive it become its keepers. That a copy was his, and stayed in the family, is about as direct a piece of evidence for the connection as the record offers.
The order itself has not vanished into the doctrine it influenced. It was founded in São Paulo in 1909 and continues; the four ideals its members were to vibrate toward — Harmony, Love, Truth and Justice — are the same four the hymns of Santo Daime name together, and three of them were already the motto of the circle in Brasileia in 1916.