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Sandra Lucia Goulart
that the Mestre Irineu was isolated inside the forest for several days, consuming in this period, only saltless manioc and the ayahuasca itself. Throughout his isolation in the forest, it is told that Mestre Irineu acquired the power to communicate with plants and animals. It was this diet and isolation in the forest that led to the revelation of the foundations of the Daime doctrine, made by a female entity to Mestre Irineu. In the Daime cult however, only the requirements related to alcohol and sex were kept. Moreover, they now gain a new meaning. Instead of being linked to other dietary rules, resulted from a whole magic classification of nature, these prohibitions refer to other morality. They are seen as a “cleaning”, in a more general character. It is not just about detoxifying the body, but rather “cleaning the impurities of the matter” so that the spirit can reach the “astral”. “Matter”, “spirit” and “astral” are fundamental categories of the daimist cosmology. “Matter” and “spirit” makes up a duality that guides and means the believers’ life and his behavior in this religion. The “matter” encompasses not only the physical body, but the whole sphere of “material earth life” associated in the daimist perspective to a “world of illusions”. The “spirit” opposes to the matter, pure and free from the “illusions” of the earthly life. The spirit relates to the “astral” world, a higher plan in which the spirit beings and deities live. Consuming the Daime is seen as a means of approaching the “astral world”. For this, one must move away from the “matter affection” and the “world of illusions”, which includes “addictions” and “bad habits” as daimists and several of its hymns lyrics often say. Sex, alcohol use, and attitudes that indicate greed, vanity, pride, are classified as “bad habits” which bind us to the matter preventing the spirit from reaching the “astral”. Accordingly, both the diet related to the use of Daime as the conceptions about diseases and their cures, in the daimist cult, are related to a more ascetic morality, in which aspects seen as mundane or secular are devalued and classified as inferior, impure or still sinful. The presence of some elements of this morality in turn, binds the daimist cult to broader processes that affected and transformed all the Brazilian old popular religious culture, from the 1930s. Indeed, several scholars of the subject show that, during this period, a new religious ethic emerges - in both urban and rural areas. This new ethic is expressed in different ways, either through the transformation of ancient religiosity as also through the emergence of new religions. Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz[19], for example, tried to show how from that moment a more ascetic moral came to dominate the popular Catholic practices that were once deeply marked by the sacralization of the festive aspects. Regarding in particular the Amazonian context, some authors, such as Galvão[7], highlight the transformation of traditional religious forms, such