The Sacred Without Worshippers: The Evolution of Values and Cultural Memory

The evolution of the sacred is a fascinating process of meaning migrating from the religious sphere to the sphere of secular law and civic ethos. The text analyzes how ancient axiological systems of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Rome, despite the decline of their cults, persist in our cultural memory as foundations of contemporary morality. Drawing on the concepts of Durkheim and Weber, the author traces the "disenchantment of the world," which paradoxically does not destroy the sacred but relegates it to archives and state structures. Deities, treated as semiotic nodes, become archetypes shaping today's legal imagination. The article sheds new light on sanction mechanisms such as damnatio memoriae and atimia, demonstrating their evolution from theological visions of punishment to contemporary reputation systems, demonstrating that the sacred continues to influence our reality, albeit in a modified, secularized form.