Maranhão and the road west: 1890–1912
1890 — Raimundo Irineu Serra is born in rural São Vicente Ferrer, in the Baixada Maranhense. The baptismal registry gives 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 settled it. His parents were descended from enslaved people; slavery had been abolished in Brazil two years before his birth.
1891 — He is baptised in the main church of São Vicente Ferrer on March 22.
c. 1905 — He leaves home in his mid-teens. The accounts differ as to why: some describe a quarrel with his uncle Paulo, others a romance with an older cousin that his mother opposed.
c. 1909 — He reaches Belém and works some months as a gardener to pay his passage onward.
1910–1912 — He serves on the commission fixing the boundary between Brazil and Peru, rising to its treasurer.
1912 — He settles in Acre, first at Xapurí, then Brasileia, arriving into the collapse of the rubber boom in a region built on debt-peonage and on the displacement of hundreds of thousands of northeasterners.
The forest, and the first circle: 1914–1930
c. 1914 — He meets the brothers Antônio and André Costa, also from Maranhão. Antônio tells him about ayahuasca, having been introduced to it by a Peruvian ayahuasquero named Crescêncio Pizango. The sources describe his own first drinking as probable rather than documented, on the frontier shared by Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.
During a forest diet he sees the moon come toward him with an eagle at its centre, and within it a woman who gives him a hymn and the instruction to found a doctrine. He knows her first as the Queen of the Forest and later names her as Our Lady of the Conception.
1916 — The Círculo de Regeneração e Fé is founded at Brasileia under the motto Harmonia, Amor e Verdade. Its president is Antônio Raimundo Costa; its members are rubber tappers, hunters and farmers. The parent order in São Paulo, the Círculo Esotérico da Comunhão do Pensamento, counts it as one of its cells.
May 26, 1930 — He leads the first official trabalho of the doctrine in Rio Branco, Acre.
Succession and expansion: 1965–1990
1965 — Sebastião Mota de Melo, born at Ega — now Tefé — in Amazonas on May 3, 1920, meets Mestre Irineu.
July 6, 1971 — Mestre Irineu dies in Rio Branco.
1975 — The church body that became CEFLURIS holds its first official work at Colônia Cinco Mil.
1982 — Céu do Mar, the first Santo Daime church in southern Brazil, opens under Paulo Roberto Silva e Souza.
1983 — Céu do Mapiá is founded in the Amazonian interior, later becoming CEFLURIS's headquarters.
January 20, 1990 — Padrinho Sebastião dies at Céu do Mapiá. His son Alfredo Gregório de Melo, Padrinho Alfredo, takes over leadership of the line.
Recognition abroad
2009 — A United States District Judge rules that the Drug Enforcement Administration is barred from penalising the sacramental use of Daime tea by Santo Daime practitioners in Oregon, a decision the tradition regards as an important marker of its legal standing there.