The Open Door

Santo Daime, Spiritism, and the Orthodox Diagnosis of the Psychedelic-Religious Moment

The desire to see spirits, curiosity to find out anything about them and from them, is a sign of the greatest foolishness and total ignorance of the Orthodox Church’s traditions concerning moral and active life. Knowledge of spirits is acquired quite differently than is supposed by the inexperienced and careless experimenter. Open communion with spirits for the inexperienced is the greatest misfortune, or serves as a source of the greatest misfortunes.

— Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, The Threshold, p. 71

The Mercy of Blindness

Something is happening in the spiritual landscape of the Western world that most religious commentary has not yet found adequate language for. The psychedelic renaissance — ayahuasca retreats marketed as “healing,” psilocybin therapy entering clinical trials, DMT experiences described in the vocabulary of Christian mysticism — is not merely a therapeutic trend or a counterculture revival. It is, increasingly, a religious phenomenon. And it is being theologized in real time.

The movements leading this theologization did not emerge from nowhere. Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion founded in the 1930s and now present on five continents, is perhaps the most developed and theologically explicit of them. It is a sacramental religion, with hymns, liturgical structure, a doctrine, and a cosmology — and its central sacrament is a psychoactive brew called Daime, prepared from the ayahuasca vine and chacruna. It is explicitly Christian in its language, invoking Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Cross in nearly every ceremony. And it is structured, at its doctrinal core, by the Spiritist theology of Allan Kardec.

It is worth pausing here. The goal of this essay is not to dismiss these experiences or the sincere seeking of those who have them. The goal is to apply to this moment one of the most rigorous diagnostic frameworks that exists in the Christian tradition: the Orthodox Patristic teaching on the discernment of spirits, as articulated in the nineteenth century by Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov and applied by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose as a direct diagnosis of the modern occult revival. What these Fathers say, once you have let them speak, is not what you expect — and it is not comfortable.

Brianchaninov, in his collected works (now available in English as The Threshold: Trials at the Crossroads of Eternity), opens his treatment of the spirit world with a foundational anthropological claim. Before the Fall, man possessed sensory organs capable of perceiving the spiritual realm directly. After the Fall, those organs were coarsened. But this coarsening, Brianchaninov insists, was not merely a punishment. It was a mercy:

Most wisely and mercifully, these gates remain constantly closed in fallen men, lest our sworn enemies, the fallen spirits, burst in upon us and bring about our perdition. This measure is all the more essential in that we, after the fall, find ourselves in the realm of fallen spirits, surrounded by them, enslaved by them.

— Brianchaninov, Collected Works, Vol. III

The coarseness of the body, in other words, is the wall of a prison that protects the prisoner from what is outside. We have fallen into the realm of fallen spirits. The spiritual blindness of ordinary life is not an obstacle to be overcome by technique, by breath work, by plant medicine, or by séance. It is God’s own providential mercy, protecting a fallen humanity from contact with a fallen spiritual world.

From this premise, everything else follows. Any method that deliberately removes that protective coarseness — that “opens the senses” by human initiative rather than divine grace — does not thereby grant access to heaven. It grants access to the aerial realm. And in the aerial realm, the inhabitants are not what they claim to be.

A Religion Born from Contact

Santo Daime did not emerge from a single visionary encounter. It emerged from a structured, deliberate engagement with the spirit world across several generations. Understanding its genealogy is essential to understanding what the Orthodox Fathers would say about it.

The religion was founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra — known as Mestre Irineu — in the Brazilian state of Acre in the 1930s. His foundational experience was a vision received during an ayahuasca session in which a being presenting herself as the Virgin of the Conception — the “Queen of the Forest” — instructed him to create a new religion centered on the sacramental use of the brew. Alex Polari de Alverga, one of the tradition’s primary theological voices, describes what this religion was to become:

The beings [the Daime reveals] are not merely archetypes and symbols. It is the experience of most people who become initiates within the Daime Path, and of many who drink Daime but do not join the Path, that Jesus, the Virgin Mother, and other beings not necessarily traditionally connected with Christianity, are palpable, seeable, heard, and, in some cases, touchable entities. It is not unusual for a person to directly experience teaching and healing within the miração, the living visions that the Daime often brings.

— Alex Polari de Alverga, Forest of Visions (Park Street Press, 1999), p. xxii

Polari de Alverga is careful to distinguish this from mere symbolism or archetypes. These are, in the Daime view, real encounters with real beings. The brew is not a psychological tool. It is described as a gateway — and more than a gateway:

It is simultaneously a Being and a gateway to other dimensions where other Beings reside. The physical tea is made in a ceremony in which an alchemical process takes place. There is a combining of elements in an intensely focused and sacredly held space that results in the incarnation, the embodying of a Divine Being into a liquid body.

— Polari de Alverga, Forest of Visions, p. xxiii

The Daime, then, is not merely a sacrament that points toward the Divine. It is itself described as an incarnate divine intelligence. This is a theological claim of the highest order, and it is worth holding it alongside the Orthodox understanding of the Eucharist — not to equate them, but to register the magnitude of what is being asserted.

The second major figure in the tradition’s formation is Sebastião Mota de Melo — Padrinho Sebastião — who came to Mestre Irineu in the 1960s and eventually led one of the three branches that formed after Irineu’s death. What Polari de Alverga records about Padrinho Sebastião’s background is theologically decisive:

By trade he was a canoe maker, but by predilection he was a mediumistic healer of the first order. Before coming to the Daime he spent many years leading and training groups of mediums in the healing and service of souls in need, incarnate and disincarnate.

— Polari de Alverga, Forest of Visions, p. xxvii

Here is the Kardecist infrastructure made visible. Padrinho Sebastião came to Santo Daime already formed in the theology and practice of Brazilian Spiritism — a tradition derived directly from the work of the French educator and occultist Allan Kardec, who published The Spirits’ Book in 1857. Barnard notes in Liquid Light that Santo Daime drew from “the Kardecist Spiritist tradition” as one of its generative streams. This is not an incidental detail. Kardec’s theology is the doctrinal skeleton that gives Santo Daime’s mediumship practices their systematic shape.

Padrinho Sebastião was also, according to Polari de Alverga, understood within the tradition to be “the reincarnation of John the Baptist, the harbinger of the mission of the Master Jesus” (Forest of Visions, p. xl). Mestre Irineu’s own mission was described as the replanting of the Doctrine of Jesus Christ on Earth — but a Doctrine understood in distinctly non-traditional terms:

The Doctrine... does not signify a set of rigid rules or an orthodox set of ideas. The Doctrine spoken of in many hymns of the Daime is a living matrix of consciousness. Jesus Christ implanted a conscious seed in this world by his life and death... Legend has it that when Jesus died, the Doctrine saw the distortions being made to Jesus’ teachings, and It knew the necessary darkness ahead for humanity. It left the world at large, entering the deep forest. There It secreted Itself in the jagube vine and the rainha leaf.

— Polari de Alverga, Forest of Visions, p. xxiv

The claim, stated plainly, is that the true Christianity retreated into the ayahuasca vine after the crucifixion, was preserved there by Amazonian peoples, and was restored to humanity through Mestre Irineu. This is not a peripheral legend. It is the founding mythology of the religion, and it functions as an account of why Santo Daime supersedes the Church — because the Church, with its “distortions,” lost the Doctrine that is now recovered through the brew.

What the Spirits Teach

To understand what is being transmitted through Santo Daime’s doctrinal structure, one must go to Kardec. The Spirits’ Book presents itself as a catechism received directly from “spirits of high degree, transmitted through various mediums” (title page). It is, in other words, a theology whose source is explicitly the spirit world. And its content is consistent, systematic, and directly opposed to Christian orthodoxy on every essential point.

Fr. Seraphim Rose, in The Soul After Death, identifies five doctrines that he argues are consistently transmitted by spirits through mediums — doctrines that, he contends, were designed specifically to dismantle the Christian understanding of life and death. Each of these five points is demonstrably present in Kardec’s texts and structurally present in Santo Daime’s cosmology.

First: death is not to be feared, and is in fact liberation. Kardec’s Spirits’ Book teaches that spirit existence after death is experienced as expanding freedom, and that successive incarnations are “always progressive, and never retrograde” (p. 34). The Christian teaching — that death is the moment of particular judgment, the closing of the door on repentance, the entrance into either blessedness or torment — is not merely absent from this cosmology. It is structurally impossible within it.

Second: there is no judgment, and no hell. The Spirits’ Book acknowledges difficulty and suffering in the spirit world, but only as temporary educational experiences en route to eventual perfection. The finality of judgment — the “great gulf fixed” of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man — has no place here. Rose’s summary of this occult teaching: every investigator of mediumistic communication finds that “the reward-punishment model of the afterlife is abandoned and disavowed” and that the being of light responds “not with anger and rage, but rather only with understanding, and even with humor” (The Soul After Death, p. 168, quoting Dr. Moody).

Third: death is a transition to a higher state of consciousness. In Santo Daime’s framework, the miração — the visionary state induced by the Daime — is itself described as access to the dimensions that death will eventually open permanently. Polari de Alverga writes that the miração “contains the model for a new state of being brought forth from an internal reality” (Forest of Visions, Introduction). The sacrament is a rehearsal for death — but a death understood as expansion, not judgment.

Fourth: the purpose of human existence is spiritual evolution, not repentance and salvation. Kardec is explicit: “A spirit’s successive corporeal existences are always progressive, and never retrograde; but the rapidity of our progress depends on the efforts we make to arrive at perfection” (The Spirits’ Book, p. 34). This is not Christianity with reincarnation added. It is a fundamentally different account of what human beings are and what they are for. In this framework, the Cross is not the price of redemption but a symbol of “the seed of compassion” planted in human consciousness — a catalyst for collective evolution.

Fifth: the experiences themselves are spiritual preparation. Daime ceremonies are explicitly understood within the tradition as accelerated spiritual development — Polari de Alverga calls the Daime “a short cut... a very intense, demanding path to which people whose souls are ready to take a huge evolutionary leap are drawn” (Forest of Visions, p. xxvii). The traditional Christian preparation for eternity — faith, repentance, the Sacraments, ascetic struggle under obedience — is rendered not so much wrong as unnecessary and slow.

Rose’s assessment of this five-point structure, written in 1980, reads today like a diagnosis made before the symptoms fully appeared:

Every one of these five points is part of the teaching of 19th-century Spiritualism as revealed at that time by the ‘spirits’ themselves through mediums. It is a teaching literally devised by demons with the single clear intention of overthrowing the traditional Christian teaching on life after death and changing mankind’s whole outlook on religion.

— Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009), p. 169

This is not the language of academic religious comparison. It is a pastoral alarm. And its precision is worth taking seriously: not one of these five doctrines is arbitrary or peripheral. Each targets a specific structural support of Christian soteriology. Remove them, and what remains may retain the vocabulary of Christianity — Christ, Light, Love, the Virgin — while carrying none of its substance.

The Medium as Martyr of Charity

The theological heart of Santo Daime’s distinctive practice — the element that most visibly separates it from other ayahuasca traditions — is its mediumship work. In specific ceremonies called trabalhos (works), trained daimista mediums deliberately open themselves to receive disincarnate spirits. This practice is presented, within the tradition, as an act of charity — a willingness to suffer on behalf of spirits who cannot find their way. G. William Barnard, a scholar who underwent initiation in the tradition, offers a detailed first-person account of how this practice was explained to him:

There are some daimista mediums who consciously, willingly, open themselves to what in the Santo Daime we call ‘suffering spirits.’ These are spirits of people who have died, but for a number of reasons are still sticking around — they haven’t moved on yet to the next world... As a medium, you can allow these spirits to express themselves in-and-through you, you can let them cry and wail, and you can feel their pain, but on a deeper level, I bet there’s a part of you, a really deep part of you, where you stay centered, quiet, calm, in your heart and in the Light — that’s what gives these suffering spirits a chance to let go, to go to the Light, to be transformed.

— G. William Barnard, Liquid Light: Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2022), pp. 34–35

Polari de Alverga frames the same practice in explicitly redemptive terms: “The medium becomes host and mediator for obsessive and suffering spirits, whose healing depends on charity and compassion” (Forest of Visions, p. 107). The language of self-offering, of sacrificial hosting of the suffering, of redemptive mediation — this is unmistakably Christian in its register. It is also, from the Orthodox Patristic perspective, precisely where the deception is most elegant.

Brianchaninov wrote about mediumistic practice in his own era — when it was called “magnetism” — and his words have lost none of their force. He describes the logic that draws people to it:

Paying no attention to God’s commands, not bothering to find out whether what he does is pleasing to God or according to His will, such a frivolous seeker of the mystical blindly abandons himself to the power of magnetism, and without any prior preparation, he suddenly comes into contact with demons, allowing them control over himself, acting under their direction and according to their instructions. What is this if not apostacy?

— Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, The Threshold (Holy Trinity Publications, 2023), p. 20

The word apostacy is arresting. Brianchaninov is not describing malicious or even conscious rejection of God. He is describing a structural departure — the act of placing oneself under spiritual direction that is not the direction of the Holy Spirit, regardless of the sincerity or charity with which one does so. The medium who opens himself to suffering spirits in a spirit of love is not, in Brianchaninov’s view, thereby protected. Sincerity is not discernment.

The critical question the Orthodox tradition asks of any claimed spiritual contact is not “does this feel loving?” or “does this produce healing?” It is: by what authority, by what preparation, and under whose supervision? Brianchaninov is direct about the answers the tradition requires:

The correct, lawful entry into the world of spirits is provided only by the doctrine and practice of Christian struggle. All other means are unlawful and must be renounced as worthless and ruinous. It is God Himself Who leads the true struggler of Christ into perception [of spirits]. When God is guiding, the phantoms of truth, in which falsehood clothes itself, are separated from truth itself.

— Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 24

And on the nature of what appears to those who open themselves without this preparation:

Although the demons, in appearing to men, usually assume the appearance of bright angels in order to deceive the more easily; although they also strive sometimes to convince men that they are human souls and not demons (this manner of deception at the present time is in special fashion among demons, due to the particular disposition of contemporary men to believe it) — still one must not trust them in any way whatsoever. With them truth is mixed with falsehood; truth is used at times only for a more convenient deception.

— Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, Collected Works, Vol. III, pp. 7–9

“This manner of deception at the present time is in special fashion among demons.” Brianchaninov wrote this in the mid-nineteenth century, in response to the explosion of European Spiritism. He could not have named Santo Daime. But he named its mechanism with perfect precision: spirits presenting themselves as the souls of the dead who need charitable assistance — this, he says, is specifically characteristic of contemporary demonic strategy.

Rose adds the epistemological point that makes this so hard to argue against from inside the experience:

If the saints have not always recognized demons who appeared to them in the form of saints and Christ Himself, how is it possible for us to think of ourselves that we will recognize them without mistake? The sole means of salvation from these spirits is absolutely to refuse perception of them and communion with them, acknowledging ourselves as unfit for such perception and communion.

— Rose, The Soul After Death, p. 77, quoting Brianchaninov

The saints — men and women of verified holiness, formed over decades of ascetic struggle, operating within the full sacramental life of the Church — were sometimes deceived. The tradition therefore counsels not improved discernment technique, but refusal. Not better screening of spirits, but closed doors. This is not timidity or intellectual narrowness. It is the conclusion of centuries of hard experience.

What Authentic Vision Actually Looks Like

The Orthodox critique of Santo Daime and Spiritism is not merely prohibitive. It is grounded in a positive account of what authentic spiritual experience is, how it arrives, and by what signs it may be recognized. The Philokalia — the collected writings of the Greek Fathers on the contemplative life — provides this positive counter-framework, and it differs from the Daime paradigm in almost every particular.

Authentic theoria — spiritual vision in the Orthodox sense — does not arrive through technique, ceremony, or chemically induced alteration of consciousness. It arrives, according to the Fathers, as a gift granted by God after extended purification of the passions, deep humility, tears of compunction, and usually only after years of obedience to a spiritual father. Gregory of Sinai writes in the Philokalia of the kind of suffering that precedes authentic spiritual encounter:

Asceticism, vigils, labours, hardships, prolific bitter tears, anguish, fear of death, of cross-examination, of being called to account, of living in hell with demons, the appalling day of judgment, the ignominy that is to fall on the whole world, the terror, the bitter searching out and assessment of one’s acts, words and thoughts...

— St. Peter of Damaskos, in The Philokalia, Vol. 3 (Faber and Faber, 1984), p. ~233

This is the road that precedes authentic vision in the Orthodox tradition. Not an accelerated evolutionary leap, but prolific bitter tears. Not a ceremony designed to open consciousness, but years of labor aimed at the emptying of self. The contrast with the Daime’s self-description — “a short cut... for people whose souls are ready to take a huge evolutionary leap” — could not be more complete.

But the Philokalia does not stop at preconditions. It also provides a diagnostic test for distinguishing authentic grace from its counterfeit — a test that does not depend on the content of the vision, but on its fruits:

The devil cannot bring about love either for God or for one’s neighbour, or gentleness, or humility, or joy, or peace, or equilibrium in one’s thoughts, or hatred of the world, or spiritual repose, or desire for celestial things; nor can he quell passions and sensual pleasure. These things are clearly the workings of grace... while the devil is most apt and powerful in promoting vanity and haughtiness. You may know from its effect whether the intellectual light shining in your soul is from God or from Satan.

— Nikiphoros the Monk / Gregory of Sinai, in The Philokalia, Vol. 3, p. ~305

This is not a vague criterion. The Fathers are describing a specific and observable pattern: authentic divine contact produces deepened humility, deepened awareness of one’s own sinfulness, and a growing detachment from the world. Demonic contact, even when it feels profoundly luminous and loving, produces — somewhere, eventually — vanity, spiritual self-congratulation, and a sense of one’s own special election or advancement.

The Daime literature is honest enough that one can find both patterns present in accounts of the experience. Barnard’s Liquid Light contains moments of genuine humility and self-confrontation alongside accounts of visionary grandeur, cosmic significance, and spiritual exceptionalism. The tradition itself acknowledges the danger of “low astral spirits” and warns against them. But the very framework that the tradition uses to navigate this danger — the experienced medium who can “stay centered in the Light” while hosting dark spirits — is precisely what the Orthodox Fathers identify as the point of maximum vulnerability.

Gregory of Sinai, writing in the Philokalia, advises on the delusions that arise specifically in prayer and meditative practice — the bright visions, the lights, the shapes that present themselves:

The fathers, in their discrimination, wrote that one should not pay any attention to such diabolic manifestations, whether they come through images, or light, or fire, or some other deceptive form. For the devil can deceive even in sleep or through the senses. If we accept such delusions, he makes the intellect, in its utter ignorance and self-conceit, depict various shapes or colours so that we think that this is a manifestation of God or of an angel.

— St. Gregory of Sinai, in The Philokalia, Vol. 3, p. ~82

The instruction the Fathers give is not “develop better discernment within the visionary state.” It is: during prayer, keep the intellect “free from form, shape, and colour, and not give access to anything at all, whether light, fire or anything else” (The Philokalia, Vol. 3, p. 82). The entire visionary dimension is to be treated with extreme suspicion. Not because beauty is impossible in authentic grace, but because fallen spirits are capable of producing it, and the unprepared soul cannot distinguish between them.

Prelest as Paradise

There is a word in the Orthodox tradition for what happens when a person accepts demonic deception as divine encounter: prelest. It is usually translated as “spiritual delusion” or “spiritual deception,” but the Russian carries something more specific — a sweetness, an enchantment, a condition that feels not merely acceptable but transcendent. The deceived person in prelest does not typically feel deceived. They feel illumined.

This is precisely the problem that makes the Orthodox critique of Santo Daime — and of the broader psychedelic-religious moment — so difficult to hear. The experiences being reported are, by most accounts, genuinely profound. Barnard describes moments of what feels like unmistakable encounter with Christ, with the Virgin, with divine love. Polari de Alverga writes of transformation, of healing, of a community life organized around charity and spiritual discipline. None of this is fabricated. None of it is the product of bad faith.

But the Orthodox tradition does not ask whether the experience was sincere. It asks whether the contact was real, and if real, whether it was with whom the practitioner believed. And here the tradition’s answer, stated with unflinching consistency from the Desert Fathers through Brianchaninov, is that fallen spirits are capable of producing experiences that are indistinguishable — from within the experience — from authentic divine encounter. They can produce light. They can produce warmth. They can produce what feels like love. They can invoke the name of Christ. Brianchaninov:

Satan is transformed into an angel of light, and his ministers as the servants of righteousness, said the Apostle Paul (II Cor. 11:14–15).

— Rose, The Soul After Death, p. 71, quoting Brianchaninov, Collected Works, Vol. III, pp. 7–9

And further: “the fallen spirits... usually assume the appearance of bright angels in order to deceive the more easily” and strive to “convince men that they are human souls and not demons. This manner of deception at the present time is in special fashion among demons, due to the particular disposition of contemporary men to believe it” (ibid.).

The “particular disposition of contemporary men to believe it” — that is, to believe they are encountering the souls of the dead, benevolent higher beings, spiritual guides, the Christ Consciousness — is not merely a nineteenth-century observation. It describes the present moment with uncomfortable precision. The psychedelic renaissance has produced a generation of Western seekers whose working assumption is that the spirit world is, fundamentally, on their side. That the beings encountered in visionary states are helpers. That the light is trustworthy.

The Orthodox Fathers do not share this assumption. They regard it as the condition that makes deception not merely possible but likely. Brianchaninov’s conclusion on the matter is stated without qualification:

The Christian that desires to acquire an unerring understanding concerning the spirits must leave aside all ideas suggested by human traditions, scholarship, magic, magnetism, spiritism, and other similar things, for they can only impart false knowledge, in which man, not renewed by divine grace, will never be able to distinguish truth from falsehood.

— Brianchaninov, The Threshold, p. 177

This is not anti-intellectualism or spiritual timidity. It is a sober epistemological claim: the faculty by which one would distinguish true spirits from false ones is precisely the faculty that is impaired in fallen man, and is only restored through the specific practice of Christian life. Without that restoration, the would-be discerner is using a broken instrument to calibrate itself.

Conclusion: The Door and the Narrow Way

The question that all of this raises is not whether Santo Daime practitioners are sincere, or whether their communities produce real goods — moral seriousness, mutual care, sobriety from harder addictions, a sense of cosmic purpose. Some of them clearly do. The question is whether the contact being made is with what it claims to be. And on that question, the Orthodox tradition is not agnostic.

Seraphim Rose describes the occult teaching transmitted through the spirit world — no judgment, spiritual evolution, death as transition, the experiences themselves as preparation — as “a teaching literally devised by demons with the single clear intention of overthrowing the traditional Christian teaching on life after death” (The Soul After Death, p. 169). This is a strong claim. It demands either serious engagement or dismissal. What it does not allow is indifference.

The psychedelic-religious moment is not a passing cultural curiosity. It is producing a coherent alternative theology that is entering mainstream Western spiritual culture with remarkable speed — a theology organized around direct contact with spirits, the elimination of judgment, the replacement of repentance with evolution, and the substitution of chemically-induced vision for the narrow way of the Cross. It wears Christian language. It invokes Christ. It speaks of love.

The Fathers anticipated this. Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century about what he called “magnetism,” offered a rule that has lost none of its force:

A general rule for all men is by no means to trust the spirits when they appear in sensuous form, not to enter into conversation with them, not to pay any attention to them, to acknowledge their appearance as a great and most dangerous temptation.

— Rose, The Soul After Death, p. 71, quoting Brianchaninov, Collected Works, Vol. III

The door that the Daime opens is real. That is precisely what makes it dangerous. The question the Orthodox tradition asks — the only question that finally matters — is not what is on the other side of the door, but who opened it, and why.

Primary Sources Consulted

Brianchaninov, Bishop Ignatius. The Threshold: Trials at the Crossroads of Eternity. Translated by Nicholas Kotar. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2023.

Kardec, Allan. The Spirits’ Book. Translated by Anna Blackwell. Rio de Janeiro: Federação Espírita Brasileira, 1996. [120th thousand edition, originally published 1857]

Kardec, Allan. The Book of Mediums. [The Mediums’ Book.] Federação Espírita Brasileira edition.

Kardec, Allan. The Gospel According to Spiritism. Federação Espírita Brasileira edition.

Palmer, G.E.H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, eds. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Volume 3. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.

Polari de Alverga, Alex. Forest of Visions: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality, and the Santo Daime Tradition. Translated by Rosana Workman. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1999.

Rose, Fr. Seraphim. The Soul After Death: Contemporary ‘After-Death’ Experiences in the Light of the Orthodox Teaching on the Afterlife. 4th ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009.

Barnard, G. William. Liquid Light: Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

Labate, Beatriz Caiuby, et al. Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Critical Essays. Santa Cruz, CA: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2008.