The Vine of the Soul — Ayahuasca, Santo Daime, and What the Molecule Cannot Do

The Amazon, Brazil, 1930.

A man named Raimundo Irineu Serra goes alone into the forest.

He's a rubber tapper, the son of African slaves, a giant of a man, nearly two meters tall, who has been living and working in the Amazon for years.

He's been introduced to a medicine that the indigenous people of the region have been using in ceremony for longer than any written record exists.

He goes into the forest alone with the medicine.

He stays for eight days.

What happens in those eight days he describes as a meeting, not a vision, not a hallucination, a meeting with a being he calls the Queen of the Forest, a figure of extraordinary luminosity and compassion who teaches him, who gives him hymns, who gives him a new understanding of the relationship between the indigenous wisdom of the Amazon, the Catholic Christian tradition his ancestors carried across the ocean in chains, and something that underlies both.

Something that neither tradition had a name for, but that both had always been pointing towards.

He comes out of the forest with a religion, Santo Daime, the holy give me.

Give me love, give me light, give me strength.

It's still alive today, growing and spreading, recognized as a legitimate religion with full legal protection in Brazil and increasingly around the world.

Its sacrament is ayahuasca, the brew of the vine and the leaf that the Amazon has been working with in sacred ceremony for centuries beyond counting.

I have sat in the work with this medicine, and I want to tell you something that most people in this conversation never say.

It didn't change me.

Not one bit.