After bubbling away quietly for centuries in the Amazon, ayahuasca began seeping out through the foliage. A powerful visionary tea and traditional tool of the indigenous medicine man, ayahuasca was adopted by rubber tappers who arrived in what is now the Brazil-Bolivia-Peru borderland during the rubber boom at the turn of the 20th century. Various syncretic sects emerged, including Daime, a mix of folk Catholicism, indigenous shamanism and European esotericism, where practitioners celebrate the saints’ days by drinking ayahuasca and singing devotional hymns around a central altar. The practice spread around Brazil in the 80s, then to the USA and Canada, through Europe and as far as Japan, where I encountered it in the early years of the millennium. Like other “ayahuasca religions” with an international profile, such as the União de Vegetal (UDV), Daime has been subject to legal challenges, sensationalistic media reports and religious persecution fuelled by prohibitionist agendas and antipathy towards new religious movements.