The author analyses the semiotic particularities in the formation and development of various levels of meaning of religious ritual. He suggests that various contexts, which reflect the specific design of various religious and cultural processes and give form to a unique semiotic space, affect the development of ritual. He interprets ritual as the union of word and action, which allows him to examine ritual discourse as a type of metalinguistic discourse. Genetically, ritual derives from an utterance in an ordinary language, which later (because of the specific paradigm germane to religious communication) takes on ritual form - and in that way special language of religious ritual originates. To explain the specifics of the ritual semiosis, the principles of the theory of the semiotic drift are used, which in this situation permits the author to explain in what way elements of the ritual complex may cause variations in the semiotic attributes of sign and symbol. The author examines various levels of the semiotic drift using the example of the ritualogeme of the veneration of icons in the High Church Lutheranism of the Scandinavian countries. The author examines the structural-semiotic meaning of religious ritual and analyses the mechanisms surrounding the formation of various levels of meaning in ritual communication. He also discusses the particularities of the transformation of meaning of religious rituals, which is made possible by the transposition of rituals (TR) from one cultural-religious context to another, an action which provides the semiotic interpretation of this process, a process which does not ignore the meaning of the elements of the religious ritual and their semiotic collaboration in the framework of the ritual complex. The author ends with an analysis of the symbolic levels of the ritual semiosis, defi ned by the characteristics particular to the space and time of the contemporary ritual action.