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[German Version] I. Religious Studies While the sacred/profane duality has a long history, going back to the Romans, it was the emergence of an intercultural, anthropological perspective in the late 19th century that made it a significant descriptive category in comparative religious studies. In that context, the sacred/profane concept served to describe certain types of experience and behavior common to all human cultures. The anthropological interest in the sacred focused initially on early notions like taboo and mana, Oceanian terms that mean “forbidden” and “supernatural power.” Scholars like W.R. Smith, J.G. Frazer, and Robert R. Marett found here something that they thought was a universal, primitive idea of holiness: something that is set apart and possesses a primitive form of power or potency. Shortly afterward the sacred/profane antithesis developed along two different theoretical lines: (1) the sociologi…