Religious language is ripe with metaphors, from "The Lord is my Shepherd" of the Psalms to the "Wheel of Dharma", from the Manichean "Light Soul'' to the Daoist "Way". But also the idea of "metaphor" itself possesses a conceptual history spanning several thousand years. Metaphor has been understood as a linguistic phenomenon, as a rhetorical device of communication, and even as a fundamental building block of human cognition. Any study of metaphor in the humanities thus needs to start with explicating its understanding of metaphor.

In our work, we examine metaphors as fundamental instruments of religious meaning-making. We understand religion as a socially mediated system that relies on mediating between the transcendent and the immanent through communication. For our comparative work on the dynamics of this process, we collect religious metaphors within a knowledge graph following Open Linked Data principles. In this paper, we will present our domain ontology that reflects our understanding of metaphor, and demonstrate how it allows us to address our research questions across linguistic boundaries and different religious traditions.