What it looks like
The Caravaca cross is a crucifix with two horizontal bars rather than one: a shorter upper bar and a wider bar below it, traditionally shown with the figure of Jesus nailed to the upper bar and flanked by two kneeling angels. This double-barred form distinguishes it from the single-barred Latin cross more familiar in most of Western Christianity.
Origins in Spain
The design takes its name from Caravaca de la Cruz, a small town in the Murcia region of southern Spain. According to a widely told legend, the cross appeared there in 1232, carried by two angels into the chamber of a Christian priest held prisoner by the town's Moorish ruler, so that he could complete a Mass the king had asked to witness; the king and his court are said to have been baptized after seeing it happen. The relic came to be venerated as a lignum crucis, believed by devotees to contain a fragment of the cross of the crucifixion, and Caravaca remains a significant pilgrimage site in Spain, with a feast held each May 3.
A cross of many lives
Franciscan missionaries carried copies of the Caravaca cross across the Spanish Americas, where it became both a devotional object and, in Mexican folk practice, an amulet carried for protection and for the granting of wishes; the same design, stripped of its Catholic framing, later surfaces in African-American hoodoo practice under the name Wishing Cross. Within Santo Daime, the double bars are read specifically as marking the first and second comings of Christ on earth, and elders describe the cross as arriving in Brazil with early missionaries, sometimes calling it the Missionary Cross for that reason.
At the center of the first works
According to the accounts of early followers, Mestre Irineu placed the Caravaca cross at the center of the table around which the earliest Santo Daime gatherings were held, before any of the church's other symbols or structures had taken shape. Those first meetings are remembered as informal and instructional, with Mestre Irineu teaching in small groups as the ritual itself was still being formed.