Metaphorical eternity in action: The nonlinguistic realization of death metaphors in Iranian culture

Conceptual metaphors can be made real in culture and structure many areas of human experience in nonlinguistic ways (Kövecses 2005). In this paper, relying on a cognitive account of metaphor, I attempted to find out in which ways death metaphors manifest themselves in Iranian culture. Analyzing the rituals of death in Iran, it was revealed that Iranians rely on a set of basic concetual metaphors to conceptualize the taboo of death. Heavily motivated by religious instructions, the whole scenario of death is conceptualized in terms of human physical and psychological experiences. In addition to the event of death, which is conceptualized via the highly generic DEATH IS LIFE metaphor, in this culture, an important mapping of this metaphor, that is, THE DEAD ARE EMOTIONAL BEINGS, is extensively realized and enacted, which provides a unique subsystem for making euphemistic reference to death. Furthermore, the paper comes to the conclusion that most of the entailments of the source domains and some of the source domains turn into social-physical reality. The whole system of death rituals as structured by metaphors imply that we metaphorically never die.