ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the fabrication of religious identity by urban middle-class daimistas through their appropriation of millenarian motifs traditionally associated with Brazil's rural poor. Santo Daime is the oldest of Brazil's ayahuasca religions and is also the most internationally widespread. Santo Daime was founded among the mixed-race, semi-rural peasantry of the Amazonian state of Acre by Raimundo Irineu Serra. The discursive and ritual repertoires of Santo Daime are an amalgam of popular Catholic, esoteric, indigenous, Spiritist, Afro-Brazilian, and new age beliefs and practices. Through discursive and practical means, the ritual repertoire of Santo Daime situates the daimista community and its members within a millenarian worldview framed by the cosmic battle between good and evil. The reflexive character of daimista appropriations of millenarian themes might further be underlined with reference to the typically instrumental and expressionistic nature of new era religiosity in Brazil.
