The Santo Daime religious movement started inside the Amazon forest, in the first decades of the 20th century with the slaves’ grandson Raimundo Irineu Serra. It was him that received the revelation of a doctrine of Christian characteristics, from the drink ayahuasca (souls’ wine), and to us denominated Santo Daime.

The drink, largely diffused by the indigenous people of the region, is obtained by the cooking of two plants - the vine Jagube (banesteriopsis caapi) and the leaf Rainha (psicotrya viridis) both native of the tropical forest. The drink has entheogenic properties (The word entheogen is derived from Greek. Literally, it translates to "giving birth to the divine within"), meaning that it produces an expansion of the conscience, responsible for the contact with the inner divinity, which is present in the mankind itself.

According to Mestre Irineu he received this Doctrine through an appearance of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception’s, in one of first times that he took the drink, in the region of Basiléia, Acre.

Mestre’s hymns, which he started to receive after the early 30’s, brought a strong emphasis in the Christian teachings and a new reading of the Gospels upon the light of the Santo Daime, to affirm, nowadays, the same principles of love, Charity and human fraternity.

Says the tradition that Ayahuasca is a ceremonial drink and known for millenniums by the priests' castes that came from since the old Oiamaras until the Inca empire formation. Ayahuasca was the name of a great and wise priest, Prince of the Inca Empire, and Atahualpa’s brother.

With the Spaniard conquest Atahualpa surrendered to the invaders, but Ayahuasca sought refugee in Machu Picchu, entering, through the Inca's secret paths, in the Amazon and preserving the wisdom of his people by diffusing in the forest the use of the sacred drink.

Several historians consider like certain the Incas’ presence in the region where today is the Acre state. Several migrant waves of the empire’s contingent arrived in the Brazilian Amazon, after the defeat of his people by the Spaniards, motivating the legends of Eldorado and other lost cities.

The Indian of the Amazon Forest already knew the drink secret, judging by the reports contained in the myths, but it is possible that the Incas' presence provoked a quality change in their knowledge about the ayahuasca's magic use. Several tribes located close to the border with Peru still today practice ayahuasca's worship in our country.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, in the cultural contacts among rubber tapers and the Indian, the ayahuasca started to be acknowledged and also used by the white communities that were opening rubber plantations in the forest. It is at this time that the figure of Mestre Raimundo Irineu Serra arises. Been born in Maranhão in 1892, he moved to Acre in 1912, at the age of 20, working on rubber plantations in the border with Bolivia.

Around this time he met in Brasiléia with Antônio Costa, connoisseur of the ayahuasca drink, and in the contact with this drink, originated from forest, he received the force and the revelation to found the Santo Daime doctrine. In 1930 he moved to Rio Branco and gathered the first disciples around his teachings. He was then 39 years old. In 1935 he started to receive hymns that coded the new doctrine foundations. Until the middle of 1971 he received the 129 hymns of his hinário “O CRUZEIRO” (The Cross), which narrates the doctrine’s appearance.

Incorporating the spiritual knowledge of all times and cultures (Incas, Indigenous, African, Oriental); the Daime has as a central axis the Christianity and the Gospel teachings, in which the received hymns of the astral are a new and enlarged review.