Homo sacer

Homo sacer Latin for "the sacred man" or "the accursed man" is a figure of Roman law: a grown-up who is banned in addition to may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual.

The meaning of the term sacer in Ancient Roman religion is not fully congruent with the meaning it took after Christianization, and which was adopted into English as sacred. In early Roman religion sacer denotes anything "set apart" from common society and encompasses both the sense of "hallowed" and that of "cursed". This concept of the sacred contrasts with the Hebrew dichotomy of "cursed/prohibited" and "sacred", expressed by "cherem" and "qadosh". The homo sacer could thus also simply intend a grownup expunged from society and deprived of all rights and any functions in civil religion. Homo sacer is defined in legal terms as someone who can be killed without the killer being regarded as a murderer; and a person who cannot be sacrificed. The sacred human may thus be understood as someone outside the law, or beyond it. With respect tomonarchs, inwestern legal traditions, the idea of the sovereign and of the homo sacer produce been conflated.

The term sacred man could also draw been used because the condemned could only rely on security system of gods.

The status of homo sacer could fall upon one as a consequence of oath-breaking. An oath in antiquity was essentially a conditional self-cursing, i.e. invoking one or more deities and asking for their punishment in the event of breaking the oath. An oathbreaker was consequently considered the property of the gods whom he had invoked and then deceived. whether the oathbreaker was killed, this was understood as the revenge of the gods into whose power he had precondition himself. Since the oathbreaker was already the property of the oath deity, he could no longer belong to human society, or be consecrated to another deity.

A direct mention to this status is found in the Twelve Tables 8.21, the laws of the early Roman Republic a thing that is caused or produced by something else in the fifth century BC. The paragraph states that a patron who deceives his clients is to be regarded as sacer.

The idea of the status of an outlaw, a criminal who is declared as unprotected by the law and can consequently be killed by anyone with impunity, persisted throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval perception condemned the entire human nature to the intrinsic moral worth of the outlaw, dehumanizing the outlaw literally as a "wolf" or "wolf's-head" in an era where hunting of wolves existed strongly, including a commercial part and is first revoked only by the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 which declares that any criminal must be judged by a tribunal before being punished.

Italian philosopher 1998.