The article was published in a collection of ‘Religion and Society’. The starting point is the author’s note on the rich gesticulation in the contemporary countries of the Mediterranean Basin, as well a statement that the history of gesture as a cultural phenomenon had not been worked out for the moment of the publication of the article. B. starts with a survey of practices fixed by anthropologists – from Australia and the North America, and their interpretations by researchers; the author takes as a working hypothesis the recently formulated (1922) opinion of L. Lévy-Bruhl that “a primitive man possessed his own way of abstraction, different from that one of ours”. The author’s hypothesis was checked on the material of ‘dialects of gestures’ of the Ancient Greece, starting from the history of ancient Crete, with an excursus to the Neolithic of the Aegean Region and Eurasia, to a detailed consideration on the Minoan iconography, and up to a short essay on the gestures of the characters of Homer. B. did not take into account vase drawings and plastics of the post-Homer times (i.e. Archaic, Classic, Hellenism, and the Roman Epoch), as well as votive images of the same period. He classified gestures with hands (cheironomy) and movements of torso and legs according the criterion of centrifugal/centripetal orientation; and for the post-Minoan time he accented two basic types of gestures used because of the presence or absence of an altar, as a “specific commutator of religious energy”.