Mestre Irineu – Raimundo Irineu Serra, Founder of the Santo Daime Tradition

Raimundo Irineu Serra, better known among us as Mestre Irineu, was born on December 15th, 1890, in São Vicente de Férrer.

His parents, Sanches Serra and Joana Assunção Serra, were both of humble origins, slaves’ descendants who lived from the cultivation of the land.

At around the age of twenty years old, in search to know more of the world, Irineu Serra part in a travel that would finish in the city of Rio Branco, Acre, at the margins of the Amazon rainforest, starting the beginning of our history.

Since his early days that Mestre Irineu knew the adversities of life but as he became and adult and worthy of his devote, religious inheritance, he also deepened, improved and dived into the secrets and mysteries of the forest.

In the forest he worked as a rubber tapper, in the demarcation process of the state borders and also met with the divinity, through the sacred brew known as Ayahuasca, of millenary past.

In the forest he received the doctrine of the Daime, handed to him by his spiritual teacher Clara, afterwards recognized as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, the Queen of the Forest, and within this context he determined his future, as well as the future of those who would come to follow his footsteps: the Juramidam people.

As attested by one of his followers:

“His own coming is ordained by the Divine Mother for the harvest of what was planted way behind, gathering the flock that was shattered in that time of Jesus Christ”

It is through the purity and honesty of his earthly trajectory that many came to him, in search of the cure, in search of the divine and of the illumination, and finally, in search of the sacramental drink by him baptized as Daime. From his communications with the Virgin were also born the ritualistic aspects of the doctrine; its liturgy, its Christian characteristics and its role of charity and assistance: the rescue of the human dignity and the search to be in harmony with the universal currents that surround us.

Admired and revered by all, at no time in his trajectory was his character ever called into question, and it is known that among the politicians and socially influential of Acre (at that time still a territory), many were considered as being his protectors here on earth. His social image — linked to the Ayahuasca — is considered by all as one of an ordainer of the human rebelliousness, pacifier and guider of the good, and it was up to him the role of imprinting a positive reality into the truth by him diffused, as mentioned by another follower, who complements,

“This was the essence of the greatness of his being, the valorization of his spirit”

The doctrine of the Daime is the fruit of his material and spiritual development, from his first encounter with the ayahuasca in 1914, in the jungles of Peru, until the day of his return to his spiritual motherland, in 1971. It was 57 years of improvements in order to reach the spiritual rank of Master Emperor: the chief of this mission.

“I am sure in the Divine Eternal Father that I, doing a short travel, will remain attending you all in the same way or even better. Anything that may come and you get together, be united, drink the Daime and call me, because there I will be”

It was exactly on July 6th of 1971 that Raimundo Irineu Serra left us, in the physical matter, and started to attend us in spirit… and this is our oath, our responsability, as the heirs of his work and legacy, that is of taking care of our integrity, the integrity of the Daime, the integrity of our faith, which also is, and must be, of guarding the work of this divine being, a spiritual being who harvested and welcomed us in his holy doctrine, the doctrine of the Daime.