By Ana Flecha, Ph.D. Candidate in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC-Santa Cruz
With funding support from the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, I presented a talk at the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) conference in April, 2024, titled “Da Floresta até o Mar (From the Forest to the Sea): Mythic-historical spaces of Brazilian popular imagination in performances of the Santo Daime bailado.” My dissertation project in Latin American and Latino Studies is focused on a dance called the bailado that is a major part of the Brazilian ayahuasca religion, Santo Daime, originally practiced in the Amazonian territory, Acre, beginning in 1930.
Ayahuasca, which means “vine of the soul” in Quechua, is known as a sacrament in Santo Daime practice, regarded as possessing a sacred character and recognized as a plant spirit teacher. Considered a classic psychedelic due to its psychoactive nature when ingested, ayahuasca is known pharmacologically to contain DMT (dimethyltryptamine) categorized as a schedule one drug by the United Nations, deemed threatening to public health internationally.
Santo Daime was founded by an Afro-descendant man named Raimundo Irineu Serra (Mestre Irineu) who migrated to Acre from the Northeastern state of Maranhão to work as a rubber tapper. Through his healing work and the Santo Daime practice he founded, he became a well-respected community leader and cultural ambassador. Despite defamation, persecution and criminalization, Santo Daime has persisted and expanded throughout Brazil and transnationally, now practiced in forty-three countries (Labate & Assis, 2014). Santo Daime practitioners ingest the daime sacrament (ayahuasca)at intervals performing the bailado. The ingestion of daime is therefore a critical aspect of the bailado choreography. Ethnobotanical relationships with this plant spirit medicine deeply inform performances of this dance.
Ayahuasca is described by Brazilian education scholar Maria Betânia Albuquerque as having its own way of knowing that is different from the usual scientific or academic ways (2011, p. 78). Plant spirit medicines, also considered plant spirit teachers, can aid in healing and learning beyond their physical properties embodying spiritual and pedagogical identities that are part of ethnobotanical relationships between humans and plants. Rather than expressing pre-existing ideas through their dancing, the Santo Daime bailado is methodological, invoking scenarios (Taylor, 2003) through which practitioners may study, learn, and formulate insights in the construction of new mythologies and practices.
Through song and dance performed in the force of the daime sacrament (ayahuasca), Santo Daime practitioners invoke spiritual beings in performances of the bailado to reshape historical narratives and to restore harmony and justice in the making of new mythologies and building new worlds. I argue that the bailado choreographs re-membrance of colonial histories of the Amazon Forest and the Atlantic Ocean as dialogue between the feminine sovereign spiritual beings the Queen of the Forest and the Queen of the Sea.
I present a reinterpretation of the founding story of Santo Daime in which the young Irineu Serra was initiated as a curandeiro (healer). When he first drank ayahuasca, he had been taught that it was a diabolical brew, and that if he called out “Caô!” in the force of the medicine, a salutation for the Afro-Brazilian entity, Xangô, the devil would appear to him. Instead of the devil, a Goddess appeared to him who he understood to be a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Over time he developed a relationship with her as his main spirit guide who taught him and gave him power as a healer and a community leader.
Mestre Irineu came to know his spirit guide as the Queen of the Forest and the Queen of the Sea. His forty-fourth hymn includes a reference to the Sovereign Virgin Mother as the Rainha do Mar (Queen of the Sea) and his forty-eighth and sixty-first hymns are both titled “A Rainha da Floresta,” (The Queen of the Forest). I interpret the foundation story described above as a revelation received by Mestre Irineu of the intersectional socio-political forces that demonized women, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant populations throughout the colonial period in Brazil influencing oppressive hierarchical social relations in Acre that continued throughout the rubber boom and bust cycles.
Global trade in rubber connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Amazon Forest in new ways from the middle of the nineteenth century through World War II, greatly influencing social structures and political institutions in the Amazon basin. Caboclos, Indigenous people of mixed ancestry, were the chief figures in this sixty-year ‘rubber period’ in Acre as they hadmaintained their autonomy despite centuries of European efforts to convert them into a class of laborers.
By drawing on their familiarity with the Forest and integrating new practices into their lives, they built what I call a Caboclo knowledge system —one that helped them protect their ancestral knowledge while also choosing what new ideas to accept. Santo Daime is informed by and also contributes to this Caboclo knowledge system, embodying Afro-Amazonian knowledge of the Forest mobilized through performances of the bailado.
In exploring the bailado as corporeal dialogue between the mythological Queen of the Forest and the Queen of the Sea, I draw on Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento’s concept of Atlanticidade—a powerful sense of shared identity and solidarity born from the painful histories of forced migration, violence, and resistance across the Atlantic (Smith & Gomes, 2023). Like in my research on the bailado, I find in Nascimento’s activism, poetry, and scholarship a deep well of inspiration that centers Women of Color’s spiritual, political, and artistic strength as a source of ongoing faith and renewal. New mythologies emerging through Santo Daime practice embody Caboclo knowledge and Atlanticidade as dialogue between the Queen of the Forest and the Queen of the Sea. The mythological foundations of relationships between these sovereign feminine beingswere not part of the original Santo Daime cosmology, but were received by Mestre Irineu over time from his spirit guide in the formation of his hymnal made up of one-hundred and thirty two hymns.
As a spiritual doctrine, Santo Daime provides a structural practice through which new worlds are made accumulatively without abolishing the doctrinal foundations of the practice. Diverse lineages and mythologies have emerged over time through performances of the bailado, combining influences such as Rastafarianism, Umbanda and Pajelança with Santo Daime practice in some centers. As Santo Daime leaders and practitioners continue to receive new hymns, they contribute to and continue to shape the mythologies Mestre Irineu established in the 1930s when he founded Santo Daime.
Depending on these ongoing, transnational performances, new mythologies and practices will continue to be formed and re-membered in myriad ways through corporeal dialogue between the Queen of the Forest and the Queen of the Sea. It is critical that Santo Daime practitioners seek knowledge of the origins of this practice to ensure that the kinds of worlds they are making through performances of the bailado align with the healing and restorative intentions of the founders of this practice.
REFERENCES
Albuquerque, Maria Betânia. (2011). Epistemologia e Saberes da Ayahuasca. Universidade do Estado do Pará.
Labate, Beatriz Caiuby, & Assis, Glauber Loures de. (2014). Dos igarapés da Amazônia para o outro lado do Atlântico: A expansão e internacionalizaçãodo Santo Daime no contexto religioso global. Religião & Sociedade, 34(2), 11–35.
Smith, Christen A., & Gomes, Bethania N. F. (Eds.). (2023). The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Arthur Davies, Trans.). Princeton University Press.