The name of the church is a request. Dai-me is Portuguese for give me, and the phrases that recur through the hymns ask for strength, for love, for light. Members took the word for the drink and then for the doctrine itself, so that Daime names the tea, the tradition and the petition at the same time.
Raimundo Irineu Serra was born in Maranhao in 1892, the son of formerly enslaved parents, and travelled to the Acre territory as a young man during the rubber boom. He met ayahuasca in the border country between Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, where mestizo and indigenous vegetalismo practice was already long established, and the visions he received there, of a female figure he understood as the Virgin Mary and called the Queen of the Forest, are the founding account the church gives of itself. He began holding works in Rio Branco in the 1930s, gathered a community around him at Alto Santo, and led it until his death in 1971.
What he assembled was genuinely new rather than a rebranding of an existing practice. Amazonian plant knowledge supplied the tea and the discipline of using it; popular Brazilian Catholicism supplied the saints, the Virgin and the calendar; Afro-Brazilian religion and Kardecist Spiritism supplied a working account of spirits and of mediumship. Scholars of the movement treat it as one of the clearest examples anywhere of a religion whose formation can be followed in detail, because it happened recently enough to be documented and remembered.