Christ Returns from the Jungle addresses the expansion into Europe of Santo Daime, an ayahuasca-centered religion from Brazil. In this exhaustively researched tome, Marc G. Blainey situates Santo Daime’s growth among Europeans as emblematic of a broader movement of “re-enchantment” underway as individuals seek a spiritual remedy for the existential emptiness of modern life in a world structured around the needs of capitalism and the values of secular materialism. What they find in Santo Daime, Blainey argues, is a therapeutic “key to solutions” for resolving problems both personal and interpersonal (xxii). When consumed within the proper set and setting, the hallucinogenic brew known as daime (trans. “give me”) fosters mystical states that bring participants face to face with repressed emotions, uncomfortable memories, and other destructive thought patterns, enabling them to be integrated in ways that participants experience as transformative (377). The problem is that what daimistas consider a holy sacrament is classified as an illicit psychoactive drug by most Western European governments. Consequently, those engaging in Santo Daime rituals have been subject to arrest and prosecution, which has driven communities underground. Despite the legal perils, there are now Daime churches operating in twelve European countries (380–81).In framing Santo Daime’s growth as the latest wave of a counter-Enlightenment movement of Europeans interested in mystical or contemplative practice—a novel reinsertion of “inner-worldly mysticism” into the framework of organized religions, as he puts it (294)—Blainey addresses a number of theoretical, taxonomic, and methodological debates that have been central to the scholarly study of religion. Among them are the secularization thesis, which associates the decline of religion’s public role in the West and the resulting state of disenchantment with modernization, as well as the thorny questions of how to define key theoretical terms such as religion, mysticism, shamanism, and so on. Along the way are discussions of whether Santo Daime is best classified as a New Age movement (a qualified no), “nature spirituality” (yes), perennial philosophy (yes), a form of mysticism (yes), a psychedelic therapy (yes), a dangerous sect (no).Drawing his theoretical and methodological tools from anthropology, existential philosophy, and phenomenology, Blainey grapples with the epistemological clash between the scientific forms of knowledge production valued by academics and metaphysical forms of knowledge production valued by daimistas. He also examines the ethics of scholarship involving entheogenic rituals and the seemingly irreconcilable divide between materialist and theistic conceptions of reality and human purpose. The result, as he characterizes it, is an ethnophenomenological account of an “entheogenic ‘lifeworld’” that integrates the accounts of Santo Daime insiders with Blainey’s own ayahuasca experiences (39).By blurring the conventional lines between religion and biomedicine and exposing the limits of secular states’ commitment to religious freedom, the growth of Santo Daime reveals some of the deep contradictions at the heart of Western culture. Because of its commitment to cultural relativism and eschewal of normative judgments, Blainey writes, anthropology is uniquely suited to help policymakers resolve these contradictions. Positioning himself as an advocate for decriminalizing ayahuasca for use within controlled settings and subject to some state oversight, Blainey outlines a compromise “rooted in mutual humility of believers and nonbelievers both recognizing the essential mysteriousness of human existence” (377).This entails a stance he calls cosmopolitics: a “tactic for intercultural peacekeeping” that recognizes different worldviews as legitimate and the impossibility of some normative worldview that encompasses everything else from which judgments about the good can be made (366). Through ethnographic immersions, anthropologists can learn how to arbitrate in entrenched cultural misunderstandings between Santo Daimistas and outside world. Thus, Blainey writes, when daimistas’ claims about Daime are “illumined via anthropological analyses, outsiders get a chance to glimpse the human condition they share with daimistas, in that we are all faced with similar kinds of existential problems” (37).If you could read only one book about Santo Daime, Christ Returns from the Jungle would be an excellent choice. More than an ethnography of Santo Daime in Europe, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the religion’s historical emergence in Brazil and a careful account of the theoretical and methodological debates that characterize the burgeoning field of entheogenic spiritualities. It also discusses the differences between contemporary practice in Brazil and Europe and gives short historical profiles of Santo Daime communities in various European locales. The headier theoretical discussions of the book are enlivened by the vivid testimony of Blainey’s informants, as well as by his own careful descriptions and insightful account of participating in Santo Daime trabalhos, or works, the aptly-named term for the “performative and introspective labor” at the center of Daime ceremonies (5).The book is divided into seven parts, each containing two to three chapters apiece. Part I lays out the larger questions pursued by the author and addresses how outsiders can understand daimista insiders. Part II covers Santo Daime’s origins in South America, the chemistry and ethnobotany of ayahuasca, its use by indigenous peoples, and early European encounters with the brew before shifting to a review of the literature and an account of the author’s fieldwork at the Brazilian headquarters of the largest Santo Daime network in Céu do Mapiá. In Part III the focus shifts to the expansion of Santo Daime in Europe, with profiles of fourteen Daime communities there. The ethnographic heart of the book appears in Parts IV, V, and VI, with rich discussions of Santo Daime ritual, the phenomenological effects of the brew, and the existential values of Daime initiates.The last part contains the author’s argument for how anthropology can contribute to public debates not only about ayahuasca but also about the limits of science and the nature of consciousness. The “despairing Western world,” Blainey concludes, has much to learn from “indigenous technologies of entheogenic therapy,” if only it would take the time to listen with curiosity and respect to those who have personal experience—or their anthropological advocates (406).