9 “Metaphors We Pray By”
Good is Up/Bad is Down
Probably the most pervasive metaphor in religious and spiritual thought and representation is Good is
Up/Bad is Down, which is an extension of the More is Up/Less is Down image schema. Since we were
babies we have all experienced this fundamental image schema: whenever there’s more water in a glass
the level goes up, or when we stack things in a pile, more things we stack up, the higher the stack gets. In
our culture, and in many cultures in fact, there is also the idea that More is Better, thus Good is Up. Even
the Romans would give thumbs up or down to approve or disapprove. Indeed the Good is Up metaphor is
probably the most profuse and consistent one in my data. “Our Father” is up in the heavens, and people
who have out of body experiences say they see things while in this peaceful state from hovering above the
real world. Most people will deictically point “up” in reference to God, and “down” for the devil, and in
Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians he admonishes, “let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall”
(1 Cor 10, 12). Medieval European architects played with this conceptual metaphor, in that the
architecture of Gothic churches included slender, pointy rooftops. The church, first as a building and then
metonymically extended to those who pray in it, is the locus where the faithful could go to “lift” their souls
to “reach the heavens”.
In my research, this metaphor of Good is Up in one way or another was consistently used in speech,
gesture and the drawings, for example, even when drawing Paradise which would already be an “up”
space, people would place God in the upper part of their drawings. This is sound evidence that as with any
type of experience, common or less common, people’s perception is always embodied. Moreover, they
maintain their habitus (in a Bourdieuian sense), through which society and culture is impressed on the
individual, not only in mental habits, but even more corporeal ones, including gesture.
io Moral Accounting
Lakoff & Johnson (1999) contends that much of our moral reasoning is rooted in metaphors, among which
the Moral Accounting metaphor. our knowledge of accounting is laminated onto the metaphor Well-
being is Wealth (so, for example, one might say that a millionaire who loses his family is a “poor guy”).
This is conceptually at the basis of the catholic notion of indulgences and of many representations of
paradise. You pray somewhere or do something so to get into heaven quicker.
11 In one of my case studies, I asked my informant, Edward to draw his vision of Paradise. Edward is a self-
proclaimed “street preacher” who calls himself an “apostle of christ”. In summary, he was mapping onto