| Summary: | The anthropological theory of religious meaning proposed in this paper is based on a
multimodal approach to human communication. According to this approach, meaning originates
not in a set of propositions about the world but in modes of experience of and engagement with
it. These modes of experience include different forms of communication in which their
performative component trumps their propositional content, modes of communication that are
normally defined as ‘symbolic languages' when religious scholars try to translate them into
explicit verbal statements, that is, into a set of propositions. Of all these modes of
communication or symbolic languages, in this article the focus is on sacred objects, that is,
objects that evoke their absent signifieds by being simultaneously objects of thought and
instruments of thought.
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