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This article presents an analysis of the Spiritual Exercises by Saint Ignatius Loyola (1548), based on a semiotic approach. The article starts with a general theoretical proposition on meditation in the Christian context. The next part is dedicated to the analysis of the “device” that is built by the Ignatian book. This text is analyzed as a cultural object able to “prefigure” practices and the building blocks of a whole spiritual form of life. This analysis integrates and reworks some propositions of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. The contribution of this last author is specifically focused, in order to identify different levels of practices and texts that are prefigured by the Ignatian book. The article ends by situating the Ignatian device in a historical perspective of the evolution of Western Christian spirituality.