Semiotics of Meaning: The Formation of Meaning in the Safavid Salvation Discourse—Body and Calamity as Meaningful Agents

The Safavid period constitutes a foundational moment in Iranian history in which dominant religious and political discourses were rearticulated through close entanglement with embodied lived experiences and collective encounters with calamities and diseases. In this context, salvation was not understood merely as a theological doctrine or an eschatological promise, but as a meaning-generating process realized through actions, rituals, suffering, and the human body. Analysis of the Safavid discourse of salvation therefore requires an approach capable of examining mechanisms of meaning formation at both the discursive level and the level of embodied presence. Drawing on discursive semiotics and, in extension, the semiotics of the body, this study explores how meaning is constituted through interaction between body and calamity in the Safavid discourse of salvation. Within this framework, the body is not treated as a passive or purely biological entity, but as an active site of signification and a central arena for the actualization of meaning. Through bodily contact, pain, illness, and participation in sacred rituals, meaning is translated from abstract doctrinal formulations into lived experience.Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach based on documentary analysis of historical sources, travel accounts, and Safavid-period texts. The findings demonstrate that calamity functions as an active and compelling event, while the body serves as the surface upon which meaning is inscribed and rendered intelligible. Through their continuous interaction, salvation is transformed from an abstract notion into an embodied, sacred, and experientially accessible reality. Meaning emerges through embodied interaction rather than pre-given doctrine or belief.