Santo Daime: work in progress

Abstract

The subtitle of this chapter, “Work in Progress”, plays on the complementary interplay between exterior and interior dimensions of Santo Daime religiosity. It also plays on the transformative trajectory through which this Brazilian new religious movement has passed since its beginnings in the early-1930s and increasingly so since spreading beyond the Amazon region of its birth in the mid-1980s. In respect of its exterior dimension, the rituals of Santo Daime are frequently referred to as ‘works’ and treated as practical-symbolic events that demand application, discipline, focus, and exertion from beginning to end. Regarding the interior dimension of daimista ritual practice, human existence is understood as but a single stage within a much longer series of incarnations through which the higher-self undergoes a prolonged spiritual refinement by way of meeting and overcoming the myriad challenges associated with corporeality and embodiment. The individual self is, quite literally, a work in progress. Bringing these two dimensions together, daimistas believe that the self's cultivation of (interior) spiritual purification is most effectively (though not solely) achieved through participation in a rigorous (exterior) ritual regime, the psychophysical demands of which are both efficacious in their own right and analogous to the everyday ‘trials’ of embodied existence. Ritual space is, then, not only a source of spiritual strength (by way of the disciplines nurtured through meeting its exacting demands) but also a practical-symbolic microcosm of the psychophysical struggles associated with corporeality and its material deficiencies.