daime luz, daime amor
I was a university student in Boulder when I did my first Santo Daime work. I had wanted to drink ayahuasca ever since a boyfriend in California regaled me with tales of climbing into a giant serpent’s mouth in Peru under its influence, and had been biding my time for years, trusting that the right opportunity would come my way at the right moment. One day my friend Raga, who was equally curious, met a boy who was part of something she called the Santo Daime. When the next holiday came, Raga went to Ashland to visit the boy. She called me the morning after doing a Daime work with him, “We have to do this together Meggie!” I wasn’t sure; I was wary of all things religious. But Raga’s excitement was irresistible, and back in Boulder, sipping chai on our porch, I was intrigued by her description of the experience. Apparently there was more to it than Christianity— it was a syncretic blend of Catholicism, indigenous spirituality, and the mediumistic worship of the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria. Ceremonies called “works” were centered in sacramental consumption of ayahuasca, a psychotropic tea traditionally used in the Amazon for everything from divination and healing to hunting and sorcery.
That afternoon at Naropa, I looked at the framed Chogyam Trungpa quote that hung on the wall, exhorting students in calligraphy to “Question everything”. I knew a nudge from the astral when I got one. “Let’s do it.” I told Trungpa, and later Raga. I was, after all, a student in a university founded by Crazy Buddhists and Beat poets, motley risk-takers who advocated for direct experience and relished chances to shatter assumptions and aversions. Moved by an urge toward spiritual practice that was at odds with my materialist conditioning, I had chosen a university that valued mindfulness over mathematics, and designed a curriculum more concerned with awakening than career preparation. My BA wasn’t leading to a job, but to a chance to sit the feet of Jewish Kabbalists, African shamans, Lakota medicine men, and Buddhist monks.
In the context of this renegade education, I recognized that my family’s resistance to religion was both the complicated result of generational trauma, and a sensible response to a culture in which religious organizations were not only divorced from the brilliance of their original revelations, but perpetrating colossal injustices that would have horrified the messiahs they claimed to worship. And as a lover of entheogens, who was rescued from adolescent depression by LSD and mushrooms, I knew enough to say yes when synchronicity led to plants that shifted consciousness.
We invited the leaders of the Ashland church, rallied our most daring friends, and pooled funds to rent a retreat center in the mountains west of town. On a clear blue spring morning, we met at the Naropa parking lot, piled into our rented van and drove to the retreat center. We were already feeling altered as we tumbled out of the van into crisp mountain air and explored our alpine sanctuary; over the following years, as my dance with ayahuasca deepened, I became accustomed to the curious nonlinear effects of the tea—how it can shift consciousness and catalyze cleansing in advance of consumption; how it continues to shine inside us after the ceremony has ended. We signed release forms confirming that we were not on contraindicated medications, and were assigned places in a large room. Our rabble was conspicuous in the haphazard white garb of newcomers, among initiates whose well-ironed outfits resembled the uniforms of colonizers: women wore blue pleated skirts, button down white blouses and bowties; men were in blue slacks, white dress shirts and blue ties.
The work began with an invocation to the father, son and holy ghost, and rounds of Our Fathers that made me want to bolt. I felt out of place in my religious company and repelled by the patriarchal wording of the prayers, but before I could plot an escape, we were lining up for sacrament. I swallowed the bitter brew and returned to my place. Men and women were stiffly assembled on opposite sides of the room, surrounding an altar table on which a massive wooden cross loomed over a vase of pink and yellow roses, and assorted Christian pictures: a blonde Jesus, a pale Mary, and a swashbuckling Saint Michael battling a dragon.
I glared at the picture of the handsome armored angel stabbing a shadowy dragon. What was I doing here? I wanted the dragon to win, not the saint. I wanted to throw that white Jesus out the window and replace it with a picture of the brown activist he really was. I was clearly in the wrong place. While I was grumbling to myself, the people in the front were tuning instruments. The room exploded into sudden action. Guitars drilled a lively melody, maracas slammed a beat, and people in uniforms marched back and forth, belting out hymns in Portuguese that were indecipherable and strangely thrilling.
I stumbled in the shuffle of the march and swayed nauseous during the waltzes. I wished I was facing a tree instead of a cross. The surreal scene became claustrophobic as the DMT kicked in. After trying to be a good student for a few hymns, I snuck outside. Cheek pressed to the rough bark of an old pine, inhaling earthy vanilla scents of soil and sap, I felt comforted. A moment later a woman in uniform marched over, her face a grim portrait of duty. ”You need to come back,” she declared. I followed her inside and regretted it immediately; the music was lovely but the volume felt overwhelming. I couldn’t bear the feeling of being indoors and crammed into a crowd while the medicine was opening me in ways I had never been opened before. As soon as I could, I slipped out again and hid in the bushes, until the same guardian roped me back in. That became our routine for the evening.
Get through the work, I told myself, and you never have to come back. But it felt as if we had been marching in that room forever, as if the work would never end. The plants conducted an epic session of therapy on me as the hours accordioned into eternity. Whether a cosmic force had entered my body or an interior wisdom had awakened, something was hard at work in the depths of my psyche, opening doors, scrubbing surfaces, shaking shadows, dissolving scars. I couldn’t dwell on the mystery of it all; I was too busy trying not to trip over my feet while staring at my hymnbook, struggling to read finely printed Portuguese hymns that kept flying off the page, and sing along. Now that we were well into the work it was clear that singing was the one thing that would save me, so while strangers in suits hurled into buckets in corners, I concentrated like never before. By the time we were singing the last hymns, I had been placed in the front row. It felt imperative that I get it right, which meant nailing the timing with the maraca—three beats down, one beat up—while singing in a foreign language and mastering steps of unfamiliar dances.
My concentration came at a cost: failing to attend to the messages of my body, I didn’t get the warning signs of an impending cleanse. Near the end of the work, the Daime’s purgative effects kicked in, triggered by the swaying of a waltz, and before I had time to duck out of line the ayahuasca cascaded up and out of me, drenching the front of my white dress. My neighbors spooked and crashed into each other, musicians fumbled their notes, and the room wobbled as I stopped dancing and stared at the stain on my dress and the puddle on the floor.
A guardian whisked me to the bathroom and instructed me to shower off. Standing under a steaming cascade in my wide open state was the high point of my evening. I didn’t want to get out, but the guardian urged me to rejoin the others. I dried off, dressed in my jeans and t-shirt, and returned for closing prayers. The repetitive patriarchal jargon didn’t bother me this time— maybe the alchemy of music, movement and psychotropics had dissolved my critical mind, or maybe throwing up all over myself in the front row had just humbled me beyond all capacity for judgement. Whatever it was, my complaints were gone; all that was left was gratitude, like sunrise filling the sky. Gratitude and overflowing delight.
The work was over. Everyone in the room started hugging each other. I chatted with a Brazilian man who told me his family was about to join him in Boulder; he and his wife were starting a Daime point. “You should come!” he said. In the euphoric wake of the work I had trouble remembering my objections. The combination of psychotropics, esoteric teachings, synchronized dancing and powerful music was a crucible that felt like the destination of my life’s search for meaning, community and transformation. Still blissful the following week, Raga and I invited Marcio and his family to our house to lead a hymn practice. And just like that, our scruffy posse of Naropa students became an ayahuasca drinking congregation.
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I had learned to be dismissive of religious institutions and their naive followers, but now that I had a spiritual community that geeked out over hymn books, consumed psychotropic tea, and traveled in astral realms inhabited by indigenous chiefs, Oriental princesses, and heroic avatars, I felt pity for all the atheists confined to ordinary consciousness. The Daime was not only an international community led by jungle gnome rockstars, it was a path of rapture. We marched like pistons of a spiritual engine, generating a field of consciousness that launched us into epiphanies that were intimate and celestial. I still felt like a fraud muttering prayers to a male God, but once the medicine kicked in, it dissolved my criticism. The chance to count myself among this community of beautiful humans, all of us singing our hearts out and participating in generating what was surely some of the most incredible music the universe had ever heard, was irresistible. All my life I had longed for a mystery school, and now I had one.
By June, our Daime community included a wealthy TV producer from LA, who bought a mansion in Conifer and invited us all to live there. Each morning my boyfriend and I tramped through the aspens, a tape recorder in our backpack, to practice hymns in dewy meadows full of wildflowers; every dusk, through our open window, we listened to the choirs of elk bugling their own music. Every other weekend we held Daime works in the big room that had become our ceremony space, or outside on the great sloping lawn, the entheogens inside us heightening our appreciation for the dramatic beauty of the Rockies. In the glow of it all, the boy proposed, I said yes, and we bought rings from a vendor on the Pearl Street Mall. During hymn practices and Portuguese classes led by Marcio’s wife Lali, we leaned over books with sharpened pencils, marking accents and practicing conjugation. We were good students, and the Daime was our school.
I decided to become a “fardada”, an initiate of the Daime. Paolo Roberto, the leader of the biggest Daime church in Rio, came to Conifer with his musicians and pinned a silver star on my blouse during a work that lasted 12 hours. I was in. Twice a month we dressed in our missionary clothes, said our prayers, drank our sacrament, and rocked out until the forces of the forest arrived and the borders of reality vanished. It was one of the happiest seasons of my life.
But when I visited my family in Norway that summer, my parents were appalled. This was going too far. Following Jerry was one thing, following Jesus was another. The hymbooks in my suitcase disappointed them even more than my head did when I showed up bald the summer I was nineteen, after shaving off my locks during a Beltane ceremony in Santa Cruz. It wasn’t the fact that we consumed ayahuasca that bothered my parents most; it was our allegiance to the holy trinity. I was equally baffled by the fact that I found Christianity, in any form, compelling. But my life had lacked something vital and my experience in the Daime confirmed that what was missing was ceremony.
I understood my parents’ concern; surely it seemed their hippie kid had been snared by a drug cult. I wasn’t able to explain that I had been begging to be captured. That I had spent my teenage years longing for an alternative to the cult of normal. That I had always dreamed of running off with gypsies, joining the circus, anything to escape this culture that felt foreign, this cult of consumerism in which capitalism could not be questioned. I was repelled by the patriarchal underpinnings of the Daime, and I would have felt more comfortable in a coven of Wiccans, but I couldn’t argue with the design that led me to the Amazon.
My life felt lit with the shine of synchronicity and alive with expanding possibilities, as if I had been carried out of a cage by the flow of something smarter and bigger than me. The Daime was a way for all of us who felt like spiritual orphans to experience ritual in the company of teachers who hailed from cultures wiser than our own, who still remembered how to sing and dance with the spirits of nature. It was a gift beyond measure, to be invited into ceremonies that activated our own ancestral, shamanic capacities. As hesitant as I was about buttoning myself into that polyester outfit, I felt no hesitation about swallowing psychotropic molecules. There were many things that troubled me about the Daime—over twenty years later, there still are—but the tea never felt wrong. I belonged with them, these people who sang to plants, calling them sacred, calling them medicine. Even if they wore pleated skirts and button down blouses and bowties. Even if Jesus came with them.
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