Yokaanam was born Oceano de Sá in Maceió, in the coastal state of Alagoas, in 1911. He said his abilities as a medium first appeared when he was thirteen, and he came to regard himself as a reincarnation of both Elijah and John the Baptist. Before founding anything of his own he went looking, and he counted the looking with some care. In one of his books he tallies visits to 300 Kardecist spiritist centres, 823 Candomblé terreiros, 100 Protestant churches, 18 Masonic temples, 15 Theosophical temples and four Rosicrucian ones. Read that list as a statement of method rather than a boast. He was not proposing a new revelation so much as arguing that every one of those traditions held a fragment of the same thing, and that somebody ought to fit the pieces back together.

The Fraternidade Eclética Espiritualista Universal was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1946. Ten years later Yokaanam moved it inland. A caravan left Rio on 31 October 1956 and reached the Planalto Central on 4 November - the high central plain where the new federal capital was about to be built - and raised eighteen tents as temporary housing. Accounts of the group's size vary from around 150 families to roughly 300. At the founding ceremony Yokaanam buried his staff in the ground, and the spot is marked today by a monument to Maria Pastora, the Black woman who had raised him as a child and whom the community honours with the term of that era, mãe preta. Many of the first arrivals gave up and went home. Others came to replace them. The settlement held.

Yokaanam taught that Cidade Eclética was the religious centre of the world, and that his Igreja Eclética Espiritualista Universal was the pioneer in the unification of all the sects of the planet. In practice the doctrine draws heavily on Kardecist spiritism and on Umbanda, the Afro-Brazilian religion - he gave his teaching the alternative name Umbanda Eclética Maior - while keeping the outward shape of Christian liturgy. Services combine masses with spiritist sessions. Outsiders are welcome at the public charity work on Wednesday and Friday evenings and on Sunday afternoons, by prior arrangement. Whatever a visitor makes of the metaphysics, the institution behind it is substantial: twelve regional branches across several Brazilian states, one in Argentina and one in Paraguay, and something like three thousand people connected to the movement in one capacity or another.

The settlement sits 62 kilometres west of Brasília, in the municipality of Santo Antônio do Descoberto, and it is built in two parts. Avenida São João runs the length of the public side, which has a bakery, a shoe repair shop, a cemetery, a social welfare office, a hospital, the temple and a hotel - a village anyone can walk into. Beyond that is the section reserved for members, known as internal workers: houses, a communal kitchen, a school, workshops, a laundry, a daycare, administration offices, an amateur radio station, a football pitch and an airstrip. The founder had been a pilot, after all. Roughly 600 people live on the inside; the wider community numbers around 1,500, of whom 790 were registered to vote in 2004. They make their living from farming, cattle and leather work.

Yokaanam died on 21 April 1985, and three long-standing followers took over the leadership between them. That is the point at which movements of this kind usually come apart, and this one did not. Four decades later the internal workers are still there, still farming, still holding sessions on the appointed evenings, in a town laid out by a man who believed a plateau in Goiás was the spiritual centre of the planet. His remains lie in a mausoleum in the community, which opens to visitors only on particular dates. Pilgrims go in barefoot.