From the forest to the first works
Raimundo Irineu Serra was born in the Brazilian state of Maranhão and raised within the region's popular Catholic devotions — rosaries, prayers, and the sung novenas known as benditos — before arriving in the state of Acre around 1914. Over roughly the next two decades, living and working among the region's rubber tappers, Indigenous peoples, and mestizo communities, he came to know ayahuasca in its native environment and, according to the tradition, spent years testing and deepening his own understanding of it before beginning to teach.
The works that would become the Santo Daime doctrine began in earnest in 1931, held in members' own homes around a small table with a candle and a Cross of Caravaca — a double-beamed cross associated in Brazil's North and Northeast with early Portuguese missionary tradition.
A tradition finding its own form
Rather than adopting a fixed liturgy from elsewhere, the doctrine's form grew out of the community's own need to gather around the sacrament and give that gathering a shared direction. Mestre Irineu was for a time affiliated with the Esoteric Circle of the Communion of Thought, a São Paulo spiritual organization, but the tradition recounts that when the Circle's leadership questioned the use of the sacrament, he broke from the organization rather than change his practice.
In 1945, growth in Rio Branco led Mestre Irineu to relocate his community to a site he named Alto Santa Cruz — later known as Alto Santo — where he completed the liturgy largely as it is known today. By the time he formally joined the Esoteric Circle in 1961, more than ninety percent of the doctrine's foundational hymns had already been received, and the ritual structure was substantially set, with the notable exception of the blue uniform, introduced later in 1972.