A Metaphorical Interpretation Of The Religious Symbols In Angels And Demons

The modern semiology has two resources:Saussure and Peirce. As an independent subject, the study of semiology started from France in1960s, then got popular in America and former Soviet Union. Nowadays, the semiology has become a great international mass fervor. It not only penetrated into other disciplines quickly at a strong pace, but also became one of cross-disciplinary methodology.Lakoff in his book Metaphors We Live By claims that metaphor is a tool for people knowing the world and language is the cognitive production of human. All practices, mental behaviors and cultures of human beings all generate and realize under the governing of the specific thinking. Depending on this kind of mental mechanism-metaphor, human created five cultural types of language, myth, religion, art and science. In this sense, it is very necessary for being depended on the cognitive function of metaphor to study the signs.The novel of Angels&Demons, written by Dan Brown, introduced a less known sign-ambigram, and involved a number of religious symbols for analyzing their metaphorical meaning of signs. According to the typologies of Peirce, the first typology classifies the signs as qualisign, sinsign and legisign; the second one classifies them as icon, signal and symbol; the third as rheme, dicent and argument. The second typology was based on the relationship between sign and its object. This paper is based on the second typology, and aims at analyzing the religious symbols in Angels&Demons by classifying these symbols into four categories:visual symbol, signal, behavior symbol and word symbol, and analyzed them from the metaphorical angle.There are five chapters in this paper. Chapter one is introduction, briefly introducing the significance and purpose of this research. Chapter two is literature review that lists the study works at home and abroad. Chapter three is theory foundation that describes the resources and significance of modern semiology, and the essence of metaphor as well as its relation with symbolism. Chapter four classifies the religious symbol in Angels&Demons and analyzes them from the metaphorical angle. The last chapter makes a conclusion of the significance, innovation and limitation about the whole paper.