MULTIMODAL SEMIOTICS OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES: REPRESENTING BELIEFS, METAPHORS, AND ACTIONS

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Multimodal Semiotics of Spiritual Experiences:
Representing Beliefs, Metaphors, and Actions

Vito Evola

Visiting Scholar, Linguistics Dept. University of California at Berkeley - [email protected]

Dept of Linguistics and Philological Studies, University of Palermo, Italy - [email protected]

Γ^∣ Introduction

One of the scopes of religious texts cross-culturally is to express and explain the faith of the religious
community by revealing the Divine. Islamic texts, for example, teach that any way of speaking about God is
but a metaphor, that is, a way to talk about God in a viable manner so humans can understand. In this
sense, metaphor is conceptual, which is consonant with Cognitive Linguistics. When the Qur’an, or the
Bible, or other sacred texts talk about Divinity in human terms, they all use metaphors, and essentially
they make use of the higher-level conceptual metaphor abstract is concrete.

2    My fundamental question is how do the modern devotees and faithful, and not just the theologians, how

do today’s people relate to certain metaphors transmitted by their faiths, and what can these metaphors
tell us about the individuals’ concepts of themselves. Moreover, how does the faithful keep a viable
representation of themselves and the world around them notwithstanding seemingly contradictory
aspects of their representations? In this presentation I intend to show that Cognitive Linguistics can
provide a new focus on answering these questions, and that those metaphors that concern more
“meaningful concepts”, such as personhood and the transcendent, are deeply and rigidly enrooted in our
individual conceptual system, bringing forth metaphorical and metonymic associations which often are
not as evident.

3    My research, which is still in progress, intends to analyze metaphors found in religious and spiritual texts

and discourse by using Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s
Blending theory, and I won’t discuss these since you already know of both. I’ve chosen to study how
people represent spiritual experiences through speech, gestures and colored drawings. Today I will be
concentrating my talk on a couple of my informants, one a street preacher and the other a street
missionary, both Christian and from the streets of Berkeley, California.

Paper presented at Case Western Reserve University “CogSci Colloquium”, April 30, 2008.

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