José Gabriel da Costa

The União do Vegetal transmits its teaching orally, and the form matters as much as the content. In a session the master present answers questions put by members, and the doctrine is understood to be conveyed in that exchange rather than in a text anyone could read on their own. Membership is graded, with a hierarchy of degrees through which a member advances over years, and the higher degrees carry responsibility for teaching and for the conduct of sessions.

There is a written record of Mestre Gabriel's own sessions, held as the authority for doctrine, but it is not a scripture circulated for private reading. The consequences of that design are visible in how the movement behaves. It is institutionally tight where Santo Daime is diffuse, it has retained a single organisational centre rather than dividing into lines, and it approaches legal recognition and medical questions with an unusual amount of preparation. Its United States branch spent years in litigation and obtained a unanimous judgment of the Supreme Court in 2006, decided under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is the leading American case on the sacramental use of a controlled substance and is cited well beyond this tradition.

José Gabriel da Costa was born in the interior of Bahia in 1922 and went to Amazonia during the Second World War, when Brazil, under an agreement with the United States, recruited tens of thousands of north easterners to restart rubber production for the Allied war effort. Those recruits were called soldados da borracha, rubber soldiers, and the conditions many met were close to the debt bondage of the earlier boom. He worked in the forest on the Bolivian border and in Rondônia, drank the brew for the first time on 1 April 1959, and announced the founding of the União do Vegetal in 1961 while still living in the interior.

In 1965 he moved to Porto Velho, and the movement began to take the urban institutional shape it has now. He died in 1971, the same year as Mestre Irineu. The parallel between the two men is close and probably not accidental: both were Black migrants from the north east, both encountered the brew as labourers in the border country, both founded religions in Acre and Rondônia rather than in any city, and both left organisations that outgrew their founders within a generation. The União do Vegetal keeps his birthplace in Bahia and his years in the forest at the centre of how it tells its own story, and the legislative assembly of the Brazilian state of Acre marked the centenary of his birth in 2022 with a formal session.