ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects upon fieldwork undertaken in recent years with alternative and non-mainstream religions in Brazil (Dawson 2007) when I had the opportunity to spend time with members of the Brazilian new religion of Santo Daime. In the course of my research it became clear through conversations in which talk of the ‘end times’ cropped up that Santo Daime members (referred to as daimistas) were constructing their religious identities by, among other things, drawing upon a range of millenarian themes and images most closely associated with more traditional forms of Brazilian religiosity (see, for example, Levine 1992; Myscofski 1988; Queiroz 1965; Pessar 2004). Regarding millenarianism as a ‘particular type of salvationism’, Cohn argues that the millenarian paradigm can be identified through its characterization of salvation as
(a) collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity; (b) terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some other-worldly heaven; (c) imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly; (d) total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the present but perfection itself; (e) miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies. (1970, 13)
