O vinho das almas: xamanismo e cristianismo no Santo Daime

Abstract

The Brazilian religious movement known as the Santo Daime, was born at the suburb of Rio Branco, state of Acre, during the 1930`s. Its founding father was Raimundo Irineu Serra, from the state of Maranhão. This religious movement has its ritual s foundation stone in the ingestion of a sacred beverage known as Santo Daime. Because of its peculiarities and for its expansion around Brazil and the world, the Santo Daime stood out nationally and internationally in the religious scenery. During its formation process, various religious sources had been melted and reelaborated, such as: Christianism, amazon xamanism, esoteric currents, the kardecist spiritism and african-brazilian religions. Considering the xamanic source as the most important, most of the academic papers regards The Santo Daime religion as a xamanic movement, taking into account ecstatic experiences of participants in the Santo Daime rituals, leaders being compared to xamans and the healings attributed to the sacrate beverage. However, what has been observed, considering the doctrinary assemblage and the daimistic symbols, is that there is a central Christian axis which guides all the symbolic reelaboration that constitutes the Santo Daime. Therefore, even more than a xamanic movement, the Santo Daime is a Christian movement, stablishing a much more peculiar way of following the Christian principies, deeply influenced by the praxis and symbols from the Brazilian popular Catholicism. In this direction, The Daime de Guarda, a particular category of the holy beverage s private usage, approaches copiously the domestic saints cult in the Catholic popular praxis in Brazil