Cover -- Half-Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Semiotics beyond structuralism -- Why a semiotics of religion? -- A brief critical survey of some semiotic theories of religion -- Semiotic recognition -- Bringing history to the semiotics of religion -- Outline of chapters -- 2 The poetics of ritual performance -- Toward a theory of poetic performance -- The rhetoric of spells -- The principles of spell-construction -- The function of spells -- The production of certainty: analogical punishments and trials by ordeal -- Chiasmus and communication -- Repetition, chiasmus, and salvation -- The reality of magic -- The question of deception: Pavlov's dogs and dirty dancing -- Excursus: encounter with a fakir -- 3 Natural, arbitrary, and divine languages -- The naturalization of arbitrariness -- "The tyranny of taxonomies" -- "I pooh-pooh the purity": etymologies in Hindu and British traditions -- "Natural language[s] of the hand": gesture and the question of arbitrariness -- John Bulwer's Chirologia and Chironomia -- Hindu dance: gesture in the Nat̄.yaśas̄tra -- Mudra-s in Hindu Tantra -- 4 Literalism, iconoclasm, and the question of the secular -- Literalism: what is old and what new? -- Iconoclasm and literalism -- Statutes versus statues: Bentham's attack on the idols of language -- Semiotics and the question of the secular -- 5 Transformations in poetic performance: the coordination of Protestant literalism and print culture -- The repudiation of ritual: attacks on ritual repetition and poetic performance -- The literacy hypothesis -- "To have and to hold" -- The literacy hypothesis revisited -- 6 Arbitrariness, anomaly, and agency: a critique of Mary Douglas's structuralist idea of the Holy -- Deist semiotics and the attack on revelation -- The dietary laws revisited -- Conclusion.

Religion and communication -- Arbitrariness and certainty -- From pragmatics to semantics, and back again -- Reason, autonomy, and the critique of the sign -- Last words -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.