Santa Maria in Santo Daime

Santo Daime is a Brazilian religion whose sacrament is ayahuasca, a brew of an Amazonian vine and leaf that its followers call Daime. After its founder, Raimundo Irineu Serra, died in 1971, the movement split. One part kept strictly to his practice. The other followed Sebastião Mota de Melo, known as Padrinho Sebastião, at a rural community outside Rio Branco in Acre called Colônia Cinco Mil. There, in the 1970s, cannabis became a second sacred plant, and was given a saint’s name: Santa Maria.

It is one of the few cases in which a Christian church has treated cannabis as holy. It is also a case that shows what the law does to a ritual. Brazil came to accept the brew. The herb stayed a crime, and its use never settled into the fixed forms that the brew’s did.

How the herb got its name

In the 1970s Cinco Mil opened its doors to young people from the cities of the south and from abroad, many of them hippies, who came for the brew and stayed to farm. The historian Maria de Fátima Ramos, who studied the community, gives two accounts of how cannabis entered it, both from people who were there.

In one, a Rio Branco newspaper columnist known as Chico Pop says that he and his friends smoked at the church site while it was being built in 1973. Sebastião asked them what it was and what they felt, later smoked with them in the community’s garden, and the second time said that the herb was Santa Maria herself. In the other, the former seminarian Lúcio Mortimer recalls Chilean flute players who called the plant marijuana, a woman’s name; the community already thought of the plant as female, and Santa Maria replaced maconha, a word they found ugly. Ramos thinks Mortimer may have helped to coin the name. Before long, by her account, trays of cigarettes were handed round free at the midnight break of a ceremony.

A vocabulary of its own

The anthropologist Edward MacRae describes how the community kept its use apart from the street. The older members, mostly local farmers, worried about alcohol, not cannabis; many credited the Daime with ending their drinking. The young converts had come to see a change of consciousness as a path to spiritual knowledge.

So that Santa Maria would never be “a drug”, its users changed every word around it. Maconha, the ordinary Brazilian word (see maconha), was dropped. So were the urban words for smoking, for cigarette papers and for the flowering top. Those who took it were not maconheiros, potheads, but marianos, the name of Catholic brotherhoods devoted to the Virgin.

The raid at Cinco Mil

The law of the time was Law 6.368 of 1976, which punished possession for personal use with six months to two years in prison. In September 1983, according to Ramos, federal police destroyed and burned the cannabis growing at Cinco Mil. Sebastião and most of the men were away, building a new settlement deep in the forest. The raid began, Ramos writes, when a visitor pulled up plants, set off for Rio Branco to sell them and was caught. Old people and children were filmed weeping as the plants burned.

Sebastião, then leader of about 300 people, went to testify. The Ministry of Justice convened a commission of federal police, army and prosecutors, and was left with the question Ramos puts in its mouth: the crime had been committed, but how do you jail whole families? Most of the community had already followed him to a rubber estate in the neighbouring state of Amazonas, and it later settled at Céu do Mapiá, also in the forest. Its church is known as CEFLURIS, now ICEFLU. Sebastião died in 1990.

The tea allowed, the herb not

In 1985 the health ministry’s drug division put the ayahuasca vine on its list of banned substances. The Federal Narcotics Council sent a working group of lawyers, police, doctors and social scientists to the communities. The ban was suspended in 1986, and in 1987 the group recommended allowing ritual and religious use, which the council approved. The rules were settled in Resolution 1 of 2010, which allows the brew in ritual but forbids taking it with illicit drugs.

Other ayahuasca churches feared that Santa Maria would sink the whole process. Under that pressure, according to Beatriz Labate and Kevin Feeney, ICEFLU declared officially that it would no longer allow the sacramental use of Santa Maria in its ceremonies. The line of the founder, known as Alto Santo, had never accepted it. The sources read here do not say how fully the declaration was kept.

	Daime (ayahuasca)	Santa Maria (cannabis)
Status in the 1970s	Used openly in ritual	Illegal; used in the Cinco Mil community
1980s	Banned in 1985; ritual use allowed from 1987	Plants burned by police in 1983
2010	Rules for religious use set by the drug policy council	Not to be taken with the brew
In the church	The central sacrament of every branch	Officially no longer permitted in ceremonies

MacRae’s argument is that legal rituals develop controls that illegal ones cannot. The brew was absorbed into Brazilian life with its uniforms, hymns and fixed places. Santa Maria, driven out of sight, never was. Since the Supreme Court ruling of 2024, possessing a small amount of cannabis for personal use in Brazil is no longer a crime, but it remains prohibited, and the ruling makes no exception for religion.^[1][2][3][4]