Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man" or "the accursed man") is a figure of Roman law: a person who is banned and 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, much like the Hebrew קָדוֹש qadoš, denotes anything "set apart" from common society and encompasses both the sense of "hallowed" and that of "cursed". This concept of the sacred is more in line with the Islamic notion of haram. The homo sacer could thus also simply mean a person expunged from society and deprived of all rights and all functions in civil religion. Homo sacer is defined in legal terms as