Abstract
The aim of this paper is to understand both the concept of the holy and the sacred in terms of the human life form. This account considers itself as a form of naturalization that must be strictly distinguished from reductionist approaches like those which explain the holy as a merely material or essentialist category, because it focuses on the biological and the sociocultural realm as necessary conditions for refering to the holy, but does not identify the meaning of the concept with the empirical prerequisites to understand it. A properly understood naturaliziation of the holy is suggested by referring to the dichotomy between immanence and transcendence: By maintaining that the religious understanding of transcendence presupposes the semiotic and biological dimension of the human life-form, it is shown that the meaning of the sacred depends on a human collective whose members are embodied and embedded in a symbolic world
