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

The main premise for analyzing gestures is that gestures can reveal more information on the thought
process than what speech alone could. Gesture studies of the last few decades (cf. McNeill, Kendon) has
revealed that co-speech gestures are tightly integrated with speech, in that they are temporally co-timed
and semantically co-expressed. However gestures are structured differently from speech by virtue of the
nature of the semiotic channel, encoding in space imagistically abstract thought not encoded in speech,
which is temporally linear. In this way, we can imagine a person talking about knowledge and faith using
the Container image schema. So a devotee might talk about “my faith” (up-inward motion) or “my faith”
(self-upward motion) and this could indicate where the prime agency of faith comes from.

I have also asked my interviewees to perform pictorial representations of themselves, of the Divine, of
heaven and of what happens at the moment of death. The colors they use and the shapes they draw, and
the order in which they draw them potentially provide further insight into how they think.

My study intends to be qualitative, and so I’m not interested in whether one spiritual belief system uses
more or less metaphors over another, but rather to see what can be said about the phenomenology of
spiritual experiences, about personhood and the transcendent using cognitive linguistics as an instrument
of analysis.

4    I will start by discussed why spiritual experiences are so interesting to study, and then I will discuss some

metaphors used to describe religious and spiritual concepts first in sacred texts and then in everyday life. I
hope to show how the faithful keep a viable representation of themselves and the world around them
notwithstanding seemingly contradictory aspects of their representations.

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