How Santo Daime Left Brazil

Almost every Santo Daime church outside Brazil traces its authority through CEFLURIS and therefore through Padrinho Sebastião. The opening began in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Brazilian city dwellers, some of them from the counterculture, began travelling to Acre and then to Mapiá, and continued through his son Alfredo Gregório de Melo and others who received visitors and later travelled themselves.

By the 1990s there were congregations in Europe, North America and Japan. That expansion produced the legal history the tradition is now best known for outside its own membership: prosecutions and licensing disputes in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the United States and elsewhere, turning on whether a religious body may import and use a preparation containing a controlled substance. Outcomes have differed sharply between jurisdictions and the position is still unsettled in several. Padrinho Sebastião himself did not travel to any of these countries; he died in Rio de Janeiro in January 1990, while receiving treatment, at the point where the movement he led was beginning to become international. What he left was a village, a hymnal, a line of succession and a set of arguments that are still running.