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The English botanist Richard Spruce encountered with the Tucano Indians on the banks of the Vaupés River in Brazilian Amazônia in 1851. The meeting was celebrated with a Tucano ritual that included the ingestion of a tea known as caapi, which they said would bring visions.

It was the first encounter of ethnobotanical academic knowledge with the wisdom of a transcendental world whose origins are known by few. The vine with which the tea was prepared came to be known as Banisteriopsis caapi.

This vine, which the União knows as Mariri, is decocted with the leaves of a shrub that is also native to Amazônia, Psychotria viridis, known by UDV followers as Chacrona. The result is a tea known as Ayahuasca or Hoasca in academic circles. The Uniao calls this tea "Vegetal" and utilizes it in its religious sessions for the effect of mental concentration.

It was within the recognition of Hoasca's beneficial capacity to facilitate the transformation of human consciousness, when oriented by a straight doctrine, based in goodness, justice, peace and love, that Mestre Gabriel, began to distribute this tea within the environment of the
Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal.