Religion like any other domain of culture is mediated through symbolic forms and
communicative behaviors which allow the coordination of group conduct in ritual and the
representation of the divine or of tradition as an intersubjective reality. While many
traditions hold out the promise of immediate access to the divine or to some transcendent
dimension of experience such promises depend for their realization as well on the possibility
of mediation which is necessarily conducted through channels of communication and exchange
such as prayers or sacrifices. An understanding of such modes of semiosis is therefore
necessary even and especially when mediation is denied by a tradition in the name of the
'ineffability of the deity or of mystical experience. This volume models and promotes an
interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-cultural perspective on these issues by asking prominent
semioticians historians of religion and of art linguists sociologists of religion and
philosophers of law to reflect from a semiotic perspective on the topic of mediation and
immediacy in religious traditions.
