His passing and burial
News of Mestre Irineu's death was met with a formal statement of condolence from the state governor, and his body, dressed in the white uniform, lay at the center of his church's hall while members sang the doctrine's principal hinários through the remainder of that day and night. At dawn, following addresses from local officials, his casket, draped in the Brazilian flag, was carried by his companions to its resting place — a site he had chosen himself, near the house of Leôncio Gomes da Silva — accompanied along the way by a military police band and by members singing his New Hymns.
Leôncio Gomes da Silva, the son of the early companion Antônio Gomes, was subsequently confirmed, on Mestre Irineu's own earlier indication, as president of CICLU, the organization Mestre Irineu had established; he held that position until illness required him to pass the responsibility to Francisco Fernando Filho.
Who he was
Born Raimundo Irineu Serra in São Vicente Ferrer, Maranhão, in December — the baptismal registry gives 1890, while 1892 is the year he gave himself and the year on his identity document — he arrived in Acre as a young man, working over the following years in the region's rubber-extraction economy and later in a federal boundary commission. The tradition's own account of his life describes his introduction to ayahuasca through a Peruvian practitioner known as Dom Pisango, his subsequent identification of the plant's two components, and a series of visionary experiences, understood within Santo Daime as encounters with the Rainha da Floresta (Queen of the Forest), that led him to found the doctrine in 1930.
Within the tradition, Mestre Irineu is remembered as its founding teacher, and his passing on July 6 remains one of the dates observed on the Santo Daime's official calendar, marked in several churches with a Santa Missa held in his memory.