20
Tripping in Holland
For those who cannot afford a five-thousand-dollar trip to Brazil to be
indoctrinated into the mysteries of ayahuasca, a quicker and easier way
is to travel to permissive Amsterdam, where a group of devotees have
formed a branch of Santo Daime. There, thanks to liberal laws govern-
ing what are known as hallucinogenic drugs, this Daime community
flourishes, giving hospitable access to their rituals for about a hundred
dollars a session. The proceeds go mostly to maintain the mother
church in the "Heaven of Mapia" deep in the Amazon forest, a two-day
canoe ride up tropical rivers into a million-acre preserve made safe by
the Brazilian government.
One of the Dutch Daime sessions conducted by a master shaman
from Brazil took place in an abandoned Catholic church, now refur-
bished in a rural area just west ofAmsterdam, once an island.Arbitrarily
rejoined to the mainland by an industrial project that did not material-
ize, its abandoned buildings have been left free to squatters.
At sunset on a warm August evening I was taken there by an illu-
mined group of Buddhists, Dutch proponents of the Santo Daime
Doctrine who have a Zen center between Amsterdam and the Hague,
where they have been promoting the Daime in Holland since the be-
ginning of 1994.The church stands in a copse of tall chestnuts and lin-
dens-a Gothic affair of gray-brown brick with a spire surmounted by
a cross. Built a hundred years ago by Flemish refugee workers who had
settled in the area, its heavily worn oak doors were now open to about
a hundred middle-class men and women, mostly Dutch, with a scatter-
ing of Germans and Belgians, all dressed in various outfits of white. By
their looks and manner, with their regular shaves and haircuts, the men