The Alto Santo synthesis of this cosmology with Christian morality is expressed in the church’s origin narratives and in its ritual production and consumption of ayahuasca. According to the church’s lore, its founder, an Afro-Brazilian rubber worker from the Northeast region named Irineu Serra, learned of ayahuasca from Indians while working in the Peruvian forests. In his first encounters with ayahuasca, Irineu Serra’s visions revealed, not the expected pagan “devils” of forest shamanism, but the Virgin Mary. She appeared to him in a new aspect, the Forest Queen, and promised to make him a great healer.