Forget the Booze, Go For The Tea...And The Bulimia
Turns out the leader of the U.S. branch of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal is tied to a very famous family. Details:
Jeffrey Bronfman, second cousin to Edgar Bronfman Jr. and grandnephew to dynasty founder Samuel Bronfman, heads a chapter of the Union of the Vegetable based in his home in Santa Fe, N.M.
His group, with the unwieldy name of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal (Portuguese for the United Beneficent Spiritual Central of the Vegetable), is suing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency for the return of a shipment of hallucinogenic tea that it says is part of its religion.
Mr. Bronfman's group is an offshoot of Santo Daime, a mix of Catholicism and native spirituality, which was founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra, an impoverished rubber tapper working in an isolated part of the Amazon before the Second World War.
The Union of the Vegetable, one of the three branches of Santo Daime, is mainly practised by foreign adherents who engage in group meditation after ingesting a hallucinogenic tea. The other branches of the Santo Daime religion -- Barquinha and CEFLURIS -- are practised mainly in Brazil and all are associated with the Amazon rain forest....
The tea, which is commonly referred to as ayahuasca, is made by boiling Amazon plants to produce a thick, brownish concoction with the consistency of tomato juice, which can cause hallucinations and vomiting.
When Mr. Serra drank it, he claimed to have had visions of a woman dressed in white, which he referred to both as "Our Lady of Conception" and the "Forest Queen."
His followers founded an ashram-like village in the Amazon known as Ceu de Mapia, where 700 people still live without electricity, running water or money....
The chapter headed by Mr. Bronfman holds ceremonies in a tent, or yurt, at his Santa Fe home. A woman who has participated said the ceremonies begin with drinking the "horrible-tasting" tea....
Mr. Bronfman, who was born in 1955, is at best a fringe member of the powerful family, which recently sold its giant Canadian distiller Seagram as part of a US$30-billion merger that created the giant communication group Vivendi Universal....
Bronfman Dynasty, Peter C. Newman's 1978 book about the family, mentions him only once in passing among the four children of Gerald Bronfman, saying he was accepted by Yale University "but chose instead to follow the Divine Light Mission of Guru Maharaj Ji."...
Vomiting, which is euphemistically referred to as "a passage" in the Santo Daime religion, is encouraged as a means of "spiritual purification."
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