Maranhão
He was born in rural São Vicente Ferrer, in the Baixada Maranhense, and baptised in the main church there on March 22, 1891. The registry gives his birth as December 15, 1890; he himself gave 1892, and that is the year on his identity document. The tradition calls the discrepancy the questão dos dois anos and has never resolved it — his widow declined to correct it.
His parents were descended from enslaved people and worked the land. Slavery had been abolished in Brazil two years before he was born. He left home around 1905, in his mid-teens; the accounts differ as to why, some describing a quarrel with his uncle Paulo and others a romance with an older cousin that his mother opposed.
Into the forest
He reached Belém around 1909 and worked some months as a gardener to pay his passage onward. From 1910 to 1912 he served on the commission fixing the boundary between Brazil and Peru, rising to its treasurer, and in 1912 settled in Acre — first at Xapurí, then Brasileia. He arrived into the collapse of the rubber boom, in a region built on debt-peonage and on the displacement of hundreds of thousands of northeasterners.
Around 1914 he met the brothers Antônio and André Costa, also Maranhenses. Antônio told him about ayahuasca, having been introduced to it by a Peruvian ayahuasquero named Crescêncio Pizango. The sources describe his own initiation as probable rather than documented.
During a forest diet he saw the moon come toward him with an eagle at its centre, and from within it a woman 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. In 1916 the Centro de Regeneração e Fé was founded at Brasileia under the motto Harmonia, Amor e Verdade.
Rio Branco
He arrived in Rio Branco on January 2, 1920 and within days joined the territorial police, serving as soldier and then corporal. The first documented open work — a concentration — was held on May 26, 1930. He settled at Vila Ivonete in 1931 and renamed the drink Daime.
The form filled in over the next few years. Lua Branca was presented to the fraternity in 1934, when the hymnal held three hymns. The first hinário in the tradition’s history was sung on the vigil of Saint John in 1935, at Maria Damião’s house. The bailado came in 1936 after six months of rehearsal, with the first fardas: white for the hinários, blue for the concentrations. The two-barred Cross of Caravaca replaced the single-barred cross before the decade was out.
Alto Santo
In 1942 forty police raided his house during a festival and arrested him on a charge of charlatanism; the accounts describe a revolver held to his head and release the following morning. That is recorded as the incident that decided the move. On May 15, 1945 the community relocated seven kilometres out of town, to land renamed Alto da Santa Cruz and later shortened to Alto Santo. The first hinário at the new site was sung in the orange grove that June.
An axe accident in 1954 cost him the toes of his right foot. Through six months of recovery he read the Bible, the prayer book of the Cross of Caravaca and the magazines of the Esoteric Circle, and began formulating the Table Work. He married Peregrina Gomes Serra in 1956, and in 1957 made his only return journey to Maranhão, forty-six years after leaving it.
The last years
In 1968, after a powerful batch of the sacrament, he began receiving the Hinos Novos. The last hymn came in December 1970. On July 5, 1971 he approved the bylaws of CICLU — his final official act — and he died the next morning at Alto Santo, at seventy-nine.
His body was laid out in the centre of the hall in white farda. O Cruzeiro was sung through that afternoon, seated and a capella, and the principal hinários of the doctrine through the night. The coffin went out the following morning under the Brazilian flag, carried by his companions, with the police band behind it and some three hundred people following.