Raimundo Irineu Serra

Raimundo Irineu Serra, known to his followers as Mestre Irineu, was a Brazilian religious leader, the founder of the Santo Daime, a religion that arose in Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, and uses ayahuasca as its sacrament. The nationality and the highlights of the card are marked for verification. The year of his death, 1971, is given by the edition itself.

Research.2 first names him when it says that ayahuasca reached Brazilian towns in the early twentieth century, during the rubber cycle, and gave rise to the first ayahuasca religions, among them the Santo Daime, founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra in Rio Branco, Acre. The section on the expansion of the medicine through the Santo Daime then presents him as a rubber tapper born in Maranhão who migrated to Acre and who would become one of the most important spiritual leaders of the nation. It says that between 1913 and 1915 he moved to Brasiléia, on the border with Bolivia, in search of the brothers André and Antônio Costa, and that around 1918 he had his first contact with ayahuasca in the forests of Peru, through Peruvian rubber tappers introduced by Antônio Costa.

The account of his initiation is given as a synthesis based on the biography Eu venho de longe: Mestre Irineu e seus companheiros. According to the edition, he approached the drink with a Christian prejudice, having heard that it was used in rituals that invoked demons, and was surprised by visions of crosses. In later sessions a female presence appeared first to Antônio Costa and then to him. He isolated himself in the forest for eight days, eating only unsalted cassava and taking the drink, and on the eighth day she revealed herself under the name Clara as the Virgin of Conception, the Queen of the Forest, and handed him an orange that stood for the world, passing to him the mission that Antônio Costa had refused. From then on, the edition says, he was Mestre Irineu, and he renamed what he had found: the drink became daime, the vine jagube and the leaf rainha.

The edition adds, citing an article by Amanda Vicentini, that the doctrine was founded through the Centro de Iluminação Cristã Luz Universal Alto Santo, the centre founded by Mestre Irineu, which began to gather its first followers in the 1920s and 1930s. It says that after his death in 1971 Sebastião Mota de Melo carried his teachings forward. Two images carry his name: an illustration of the founding vision, which the caption says was made with generative AI, and a photograph from 1968 credited to Carlos Marques, of the magazine Manchete. The conclusion of the edition recalls him once more, as someone who found his strength alone in the forest.