Saturday, November 28, 1998

The potent brew that fuels Amazon religions

By ALEX BELLOS

The Guardian

RIO BRANCO, Brazil -- Earlier this month I found myself in a small church on the Amazon called Little Boat. It had a purple spire that seemed to have been modeled on the Space Shuttle. I was worshipping the Captain of the Sea, a porcelain icon of a ginger-haired man in a white sailor's uniform -- and that was before I started taking the hallucinogenic drugs.

By the steps of the church, someone passed me a plastic, espresso-sized cup of muddy liquid. The drug would, I was told, open my mind to the spirit world. I would gain insights about myself and humankind and maybe meet some interesting dead folk on the way. So I swigged it down. The taste was bitter and rank, but I didn't retch, as many first-time users do.

I joined the congregation. About 60 people, all in white, were listening to a four-piece band playing hymns in a Latin soft-rock style. They looked completely off their heads, most with vacant expressions on their faces and their eyes half closed. Several were shaking uncontrollably.

I sat down and concentrated hard, hoping to find myself transported into the communal trip. But nothing happened. The only remedy was to down another cup of the rancid potion. Within seconds -- bang! Back in my seat the double dose struck like a hammer. My body was overwhelmed with nausea and tiredness. Suddenly there was nothing but a swirling ocean of kaleidoscopic patterns in bright psychedelic colors before my tightly closed eyes. Each note of the music triggered a wave and set the shapes swirling one way or the other.

Despite trying to go with the feeling I was soon fighting against the current; it seemed that I was drowning, that I had to leave the church or the sea would take me away. This was no heavenly cosmos but a trip into darker, less welcome spheres.

But downing a particularly potent mix of the ayahuasca vine and the leaf of another rainforest plant is what the indians of the western Amazon have done for thousands of years. The psychotropic effect is due to the mixture of the natural hallucinogens harmaline and DMT. It is thought to help them communicate with their ancestors on a higher plane and also visit the "underworld" to locate the source of illness.

In its modern context, the brew has been renamed "daime" and the spiritual visions it produces are the raison d'etre of a crop of Brazilian religions that mix shamanism with virtually every other religion that has reached the area.

Little Boat is essentially Catholic -- the church is full of crosses and images of the Virgin Mary -- but also contains strains of Kardecian spiritism and Africa-influenced religions such as Macumba, which was started by slaves brought to the northeast of Brazil. (On the altar next to the icon of the Captain of the Sea are a host of kitschly painted figurines including old black men, crusaders and topless mermaids.) The religions are mostly based in and around Rio Branco, capital of the state of Acre, a dirty city of 250,000 which has more than 20 such churches. Taking daime here is legal and commonplace.

The father of the daime religions was Raimundo Irineu Serra, a seven-foot black rubber worker who emigrated to the Amazon from the drought-hit Brazilian northeast in the 1920s. When he took the drug he believed he met the Rainforest Queen, a shamanistic spirit he identified as the Virgin Mary, who instructed him to found his own religion.

The result was Santo Daime. (Daime is not the name of a saint but the Portuguese imperative for "give me" -- an appeal by the user for divine illumination). Each time Serra, known as Master Irineu, took daime he received a little more of the doctrine such as hymns, psalms, and rules of dress which believers consider to be the Bible's third testament.

Over the following decades the church grew and there are now branches all over Brazil, in the United States, and continental Europe. The largest community in Europe is in the Netherlands, although France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria and Switzerland also have their own churches. Members tend to be expatriate Brazilians and New-Age types who already have experience of psychedelic drugs.

Despite its corruption of Christianity, the Catholic Church does not see the daime religions as a threat. Rio Branco's bishop, Moacyr Grechi, regards them as a harmless, peculiar local quirk whose numbers have stabilized at a small percentage of the population.

Like many religions, Santo Daime produced off-shoots as followers had their own visions and started their own sub-sects. Little Boat -- Barquinha -- is perhaps the most peculiar. It was founded in the 1950s after a disciple of Master Irineu saw St. Francis of Assisi on a boat in the Amazon. It differs fundamentally from Santo Daime because rather than worshipping rain-forest spirits, all its spirits come from the sea. The fact that Rio Branco is one of the most inaccessible and landlocked cities in South America is an irony not lost on its members, who treat it like an amusing anomaly.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)