3 The religion of the forest: reflections on the international expansion of a Brazilian ayahuasca religion
September 1, 2016 Beatriz Caiuby Labate And Glauber Loures de Assis 2 citations
In the 1930s, a new religious community called Santo Daime emerged from Brazil's Amazon rubber camps, founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra, an uneducated grandson of enslaved Black people. The church blended folk religious and spiritual traditions around consuming ayahuasca, which they called daime. Its early members were mostly Afro-Brazilian migrants from the northeast, and their social world included rubber camps, military bases, traditional gender roles, and cultural exchange among Europeans, Afro-Brazilians, and Indigenous Amazonians. The group remained small, stable, and largely unknown outside its region until the 1970s.