Santo Daime

Sources

What this site was written from

Nothing here is first-hand. Every page on this site is written from a library of books, academic work and the commentary attached to the hinários themselves — 19 works in all, indexed and searchable. 76 pages name the works behind them, and 34 glossary entries carry a specific citation. This page lists the library, so that a reader can judge the basis for themselves rather than taking the site's word for it.

The library

Listed as they are cited on the pages, with a line on what each one covers.

  • Paulo Moreira & Edward MacRae, O Alto Santo — I Come From Afar (the oral history of Mestre Irineu's lineage)The oral history of the Alto Santo lineage, and the source for most of what can be documented about Mestre Irineu's life.
  • The Life of Mestre Raimundo Irineu SerraA narrative biography assembled from oral testimony, archival records and community research.
  • Vera Fróes, Santo Daime: Amazonian Culture — The History of the People of Juramidam (1983)Winner of the II SUFRAMA History Award. The book that gave the community the phrase it uses for itself.
  • Edward MacRae, Guided by the MoonThe standing ethnography of ritual ayahuasca use in the Santo Daime.
  • Alex Polari, The Gospel According to Sebastião MotaPadrinho Sebastião's teaching, recorded in his own idiom.
  • Lúcio Mortimer, Our Lord Who Appeared in the ForestA first-hand memoir of the early community around Mestre Irineu.
  • Lúcio Mortimer, Your Blessing, Godfather!A second memoir, following the community through the CEFLURIS years.
  • The Círculo Esotérico da Comunhão do Pensamento collection, including Juarez Duarte Bomfim on the doctrine and the CECPA hundred files on the esoteric order whose motto — Hei de Vencer — Mestre Irineu adopted.
  • Francisco Silva Nobre, No Sesquicentenário do Padre Cícero (1994)On the Northeastern popular-Catholic devotion that forms part of the doctrine's background.
  • Zerivan de Oliveira, Rita Gregório de Melo — uma guerreira da luzThe life of Madrinha Rita Gregório de Melo, born in the Várzea do Açu in 1925.
  • Zerivan de Oliveira, A História de Mané CibitoTold in cordel verse, the form the Northeast carried into the Amazon.
  • Alvaro Antônio Russo Júnior, Na Boca da Mata: diálogos entre santo daime e umbanda (USP, 2016)Fieldwork on how Santo Daime and Umbanda speak to one another, house by house.
  • Rosana Martins de Oliveira, De Folha e Cipó é a Capelinha de São Francisco — Rio Branco, Acre, 1945–1958 (UFPE, 2002)The religious life of Rio Branco between 1945 and 1958 — the city and years in which the doctrine took its form.
  • Lucas Kastrup Rehen, Música no Santo Daime na Holanda (doctoral thesis, 2013)On the music of the doctrine, and what travels when the hymns are sung outside Brazil.
  • Isabell Mendonça & Maria Tereza Trabulsi, O Bailado do Santo DaimeReads the danced work as sacred dance, against the scholarship of Bernhard and Maria-Gabriele Wosien.
  • Matthew Meyer, The Seringueiro, the Caboclo, and the Forest Queen (University of Virginia, 2003)On the three figures the tradition tells its own beginning through: the seringueiro, the caboclo and the Forest Queen.
  • Küfner, Rabe & Sonczyk, The Santo Daime Church: The Protection of Freedom of Religion Under International Law (Amsterdam International Law Clinic, 2007)How the tradition's legal position has been argued in international law.
  • Sebastião Mota de Melo, MáximasPadrinho Sebastião's sayings, collected.
  • The hinário footnote records in this archiveThe commentary attached to the hinários themselves — O Cruzeiro, O Justiceiro, Chaveirinho/Chaveirão, Hinário da Fé, SD Ocasiões Especiais.

How they are used

Two different claims are made on this site, and they are labelled differently on purpose.

Source appears where a page or a glossary entry genuinely derives from one record — most often the footnotes published with a hinário, which gloss a term in the voice of the tradition rather than about it. Those citations name the hinário and its author.

In the library appears at the foot of the editorial pages. It names the works that treat that subject, and it is not a claim that any particular sentence came from any particular one of them. Where nothing in the library supports a page, no list is shown, which is itself worth noticing.

The hymns are a third kind of thing again. Where a page quotes one, the Portuguese is copied from the archive on this site rather than paraphrased, and the English beside it is the archive's own twin version where one exists. Those quotations link to the hymn's page so the lines can be read in their place in the hinário.

What is not here

The library contains material this site does not publish: accounts of preparing the sacrament, of what to expect from taking it, and of medical and legal questions. Those are left out deliberately rather than by oversight. This site describes what the works are and where the tradition came from; it does not instruct anyone in the practice, and a church rather than a website is the place for the practical questions.

Nor is the library complete. It is one person's collection, weighted toward what has been published in Portuguese and English, and it holds far more on the lineage of Mestre Irineu and Padrinho Sebastião than on the many churches that have grown from them since.