Christ Returns from the Jungle is an anthropological inquiry into the recent expansion from South America to Europe of the ayahuasca-based Santo Daime New Religious Movement (NRM). In it, the author addresses important research questions that could be used as a model for the study of all globalizing NRM's. These include the following: Who are the Europeans that choose to join this movement and why? What are the most important features of Santo Daime religion to these European daimistas? How does the increasing popularity of this movement challenge the long-held presumption that the continent is undergoing a teleological process of secularization? And finally, how might anthropological studies of entheogenic-based movements such as Santo Daime best inform debates about the legitimacy of long-stigmatized “hallucinogens” during a time of resurging interest in psychedelics?
To address these questions, the author offers an exhaustive (close to 500 pages of text, notes and appendices) treatise that distills insights gleaned from participation in over 50 European Santo Daime ceremonies and interaction with 87 daimistas from multiple European nations between 2010 and 2011. He begins, though, with an account of his 2008 voyage to the Brazilian Amazon “nerve center” (p. 91) of ayahuasca religions. After describing his experiences there and providing an overview of the emergence of Santo Daime in its Brazilian context, he recounts his conversation with the revered daimista (and well-known Santo Daime scholar) padrinho Alex Polari de Alverga. In this conversation, Polari emphasizes the importance of Blainey's (and many others') intercontinental studies at a time of increased dialogue between adherents of divergent secular and religious paradigms in which the “spirituality in these sacred plants” is the focus of much political strife (p. 101).
Indeed, the discussion of how European daimistas assert that ayahuasca “teaches,” just as human sacred teachers have, affirms an animistic view of the world more akin to shamanism than to secular and scientific views of reality (p. 249). This, together with what Blainey describes as monophasic versus polyphasic differences in cultural approaches to consciousness (p. 245), contribute to continued criminalization of Santo Daime rituals throughout Europe. Per Blainey, polyphasic cultures are those “that treat different states of consciousness as sources of distinct cognitive abilities and benefits,” whereas monophasic cultures restrict knowledge claims to “information gleaned in the normal waking state of consciousness” (p. 245). Part VII of book is devoted to an in-depth analysis of how these factors inform the national profiles of this New Religious Movement (that he describes in Part III) in Spain, Portugal. Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, Greece, Finland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, France, and Belgium (which was his home-base) for this year-long study.
In a tantalizing preview of his findings, Blainey shares the general answer to his first research question in the early pages of his text. Santo Daime “works” (ceremonies) in Europe help fardados [Santo Daime initiaties] find “solutions” to the metaphysical problems of estrangement (p. 8) and isolation from others that develop when “human selves are not connected to each other through intimate social bonds” (pp. 16–17) as is typical in late-modern cultures that privilege secularized individualism, materialism, and consumerism. Participation helps to re-sacralize human experience and to satisfy an indwelling need for meaning and purpose. It also helps to rediscover an “enchanted” universe where this awareness of an inherent interconnectedness with all Creation is based on experience rather than belief (cf p. 27 and also Chapter 6 and Part VII).
Per Blainey's findings, adherents believe that it is, first and foremost, an over-attachment to personal ego that creates the illusion of separation that fuels existential despair. Thus, progressive self-transformation is a key objective for participants in Daime works. These ceremonies help fardados to dissolve ego-attachments and to thus attain a more integrated perspective on life. As Blainey's informants describe it, “Daime works provide practical solutions because these rituals tend to intensify existential anxieties to the point where 'ego' boundaries 'dissolve' like a salt submerged in water. In this transpersonal state, anxiety is replaced by a feeling that observer and observed have fused into a single entity” (p. 50).
This process often requires peia (necessary cleansing/overcoming of obstacles, cf p. 9 for more on this complex concept), especially in the first several ceremonies, as the Daime sacrament reveals the true nature of each participant to themselves, serving as a mirror and providing healing through self-observation and ritualized self-confrontation (Chapter 11). But as participants grow in awareness of their Oneness with one-another, and as they enter the “flow” or corriente [current] of collective-consciousness that is facilitated by communal practice, they find greater harmony, happiness, justice, and peace. In this way, the metaphysical solutions that daimistas experience also beget practical solutions by encouraging humility, compassion, and reconciliation when interacting with both the larger daimista community and with their friends and families. The work requires firmeza (strength/courage/steadfastness) which is a foundational value of Santo Daime. The ayahuasca visions that participants sometimes receive along the way are viewed as secondary to this process of self-transformation and are sometimes even viewed as a distraction to this realization of existential Oneness.
Per Blainey, Santo Daime bears some resemblance to the Swedenborgist and Theosophist precursors of New Age religions. However, he insists that the communal orientation of Santo Daime, as well as the focus on the therapeutic value of suffering, distinguishes Santo Daime from other New Age forms of spirituality. As Blainey notes, “the main problem with the New Age category is that it misrepresents the seriousness of fardados' Daime practice.” Santo Daime is anything but a spiritual quick fix! (p. 291).
Deeper exploration of these and related themes, generated from Blainey's mixed methods “ethnophenomenological” approach to data collection (including interviews, generation of “freelists,” and personal participation in ceremonies) is the focus of Parts IV through VI of the text.
The book's title, Christ Returns from the Jungle, has multiple connotations. First, Santo Daime is often considered a syncretic form of Christianity and daimistas believe that the Daime [the ayahuasca that is sanctified within the context of the Santo Daime ritual], incarnates into followers just as Jesus does through a similar process of transubstantiation in the Catholic sacrament of Holy Communion. But, far beyond this, the Daime sacrament, as suggested above, is understood in terms of beliefs in an animated cosmos. It is treated as a living, animated, conscious being that imparts teachings reflective of Jesus's (and all great spiritual teachers') message about the need to overcome egoic defenses to reconcile personal and Divine Will and to thus attain “union” with All-That-Is through this higher level of consciousness (p. 333). As Blainey describes it, “Daimista theology lionizes this archetype of heroic surrender to Divine Will” (p. 333). Some daimistas refer to this as “Christ Consciousness” and the Daime is sometimes even referred to as the “second coming” of Christ.
Beyond this, the allusion to Christ's return from the jungle also refers to the anti- and post-colonial emphasis of Santo Daime religion. Per Blainey's informants, Santo Daime is a twenty-first century, post-secular response to the dehumanizing impacts of a colonialist, religious, agenda that left in its wake a long history of authoritarianism, imperialism, materialism, consumerism, extirpation of heterodox spiritual beliefs and practices [including European paganism], and environmental destruction. It offers a kind of spiritual homecoming for daimistas. It is religion that is purified of “colonialist pollutions” (p. 395).
Finally, returning to the theme of monophasic or polyphasic approaches to the study of consciousness, Blainey asserts that his particular ethnophenomenological approach (cf Chapter 2) to inquiry and analysis of this entheogenic movement, with its focus on non-ordinary states of consciousness and ontologies that are beyond the reach of empirical evidence, can serve as a more appropriate stance for social scientists who are themselves grounded in materialistic worldviews than in other approaches to anthropological inquiry. He advocates neither an apologetic nor a skeptical view towards daimista worldviews. Instead, he argues for what he calls a “strong-agnosticism” (p. 385) when researching religion. This asserts that we cannot know if God really exists. By maintaining a theoretical stance more akin to openness and curiosity than to “false confidence,” deeper reflections on the existential problems faced by all humans are possible (p. 364).
Blainey affirms that his “post-arrogant” paradigm for research does not turn its back on science but rather allows for a “cosmopolitical compromise rooted in mutual humility of believers and nonbelievers both recognizing the essential mysteriousness of human existence” (p. 377). It instills a kind of intellectual humility also, while challenging the arrogance of both methodological atheism and fundamentalist theology. Instead, it exhorts anthropologists to “reconcile humanity's ‘multiple ontologies’“ (pp. 385–6). As Blainey affirms, this intellectual humility does not require that he share his informants' worldviews, only that he must take these seriously (p. 386).
This text has many strengths and is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the Santo Daime religion. However, I would be remiss not to point out some weaknesses (or at least suggestions for further study).
First, given Blainey's assertion that an ethnophenomenological approach to the study of an entheogenic lifeworld requires comparison of insider descriptions with the “extraordinariness of the researcher's ayahuasca experiences” (p. 39) I was surprised not to find more discussion of his own experiences and a comparison of these with those of his informants. He does offer a brief auto-ethnography in Chapter 10, but much more could have been done to discuss his own experiences of the Daime in terms of what informants shared with him and to analyze where he and his informants' experiences overlapped–and where they differed.
Second, given the research questions he poses I was surprised not to find a more extended comparison between the ways in which Brazilian and European fardados submit to, or resist certain Santo Daime doctrines and practices. Other researchers have noted overtones to Santo Daime doctrine that are somewhat militaristic, authoritarian, hierarchical, homophobic, and patriarchal and have explored the relationship of these norms to the early 20th Century Brazilian cultural context in which Santo Daime emerged. But, while very briefly noting that some European Santo Daime churches are more “eclectic” in their religious proscriptions than their Brazilian counterparts, Blainey provides little analysis of how the religion itself is evolving as it migrates from Brazil into a very different, European context. Finally, given the amount of attention he gives to the ways in which his ethnography might positively impact European “cosmopolitics” on a continent where Santo Daime is still largely criminalized (Chapter 15), I was surprised that he didn't at least consider how raising public awareness about this movement might also contribute to further targeting of Santo Daime and its adherents by local authorities as well as European policymakers.
Even with these criticisms, however, Blainey's book is an important contribution to the subject of the globalization of ayahuasca religions, in general, and Santo Daime in particular. I learned a great deal from reading it and would recommend it to other scholars with interest in entheogenic spirituality as well as those with interest in New Religious Movements more generally. Scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and any who are interested in questions of how the explosion of interest in entheogenic spirituality should be addressed by policymakers would all benefit from reading Marc G. Blainey's Christ Returns from the Jungle.
