Introduction: New Insights into the Semiotics of Religion

This introduction to the section New Insights into the Semiotics of Religion presents the field as a mature and self-reflective domain within contemporary semiotic theory. Building on dialogues with linguistics, anthropology, and religious studies, it highlights how semiotics of religion now interrogates its own methods and boundaries. The contributions gathered in this issue exemplify the discipline’s vitality: from the semiosis of Ukrainian carols and the sacralization of Lenin’s body, to Islamic angelology, psychedelic rituals, Marian iconography, papal corporeality, and cosmological models linking Greimas and Lotman. Through these diverse inquiries, the semiotics of religion emerges as an interdisciplinary endeavor that maps how sacred meaning is produced, embodied, and transformed across traditions, media, and cultures, while simultaneously offering theoretical tools for rethinking the scope and method of semiotic analysis itself.