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Transcendence and Transgression in Religious Processions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Massimo Leone
Massimo Leone*
Affiliation:
Università di Torino
*
Contact Massimo Leone at Department of Philosophy, University of Turin, Via S. Ottavio 20, 10124, Turin, Italy (massimo.leone@unito.it).
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Abstract

This article analyzes the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies, thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them to believe in its omnipresence, in the reassuring idea that their entire existence takes place (literally and metaphorically) under the protection of transcendence. On the other hand, “accidents” caused by the persistence of individual agencies within the collective one constantly “threaten” the symbolic efficacy of religious processions: the tentative expansion of the sacred environment into the profane results in a symmetrical expansion of the latter into the former.

Type
Research Article
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Fall 2014 , pp. 314 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the CIRCE (Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication) doctoral seminar, University of Turin. I thank all of the participants, and in particular Ugo Volli, for their comments. I am also grateful to the article’s reviewers for their suggestions. Finally, I thank Richard J. Parmentier for his impeccable editorial coordination.

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