In this paper, I argue that oral histories of the Santo Daime church’s origins reference specific elements of the mainstream social and economic history of the region, which serves to position the church as an inversion of the dominant order. These narratives are intelligible when read in the context of broader histories of the region because they incorporate symbols that condense archetypal experiences of rubber tappers in Acre, and position the church and its sacrament, ayahuasca, as keys to contesting the order established by the system of rubber tapping. At the same time that they claim indigenous roots, however, these histories chart distinct departures from them, depicting the church’s founding as the result of an authentically Christian revelation mediated by an autochthonous brew. For those in a position to appreciate them, these stories are meaningful because they refer to structures and categories held in common, playing off of or against these to situate the church’s significance. In what follow I analyze several of these narratives, attempting to put the reader in a position to begin to understand how the histories of the church are statements about and authorizations of an identity that subverts the dominant order imposed in the Acre in rubber boom. The first several of these are oral texts collected and transcribed by Fróes, an amateur historian who is also a member of the church, and by Monteiro da Silva, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Acre in Rio Branco, the city where the church began. The last text discussed, which I collected in 2002, is from an American branch of Santo Daime. As the church expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, first within Brazil and later overseas, many details of the rubber extraction culture no longer held meaning. Thus it is not surprising that the church history told to new members in the United States draws on different cultural touchstones. In the last portion of the paper I offer some thoughts on the meaning of different narratives of the church’s origins in diaspora.