If “forms of life” are defined as embodied valorizations that support a whole “project of life” (Fontanille 1993, 2015), sanctity can undoubtedly be considered as a particular form of life typified by a specific combination of narrative structures (the tension towards the transcendence of human limits and the role of death in determining the Sanction) and semantic categories (extraordinariness and self-sacrifice). The codification of these characterizing features is so accurate, efficacious, and pervasive in Western culture that the model of sanctity has been expanded beyond its original religious semiosphere (Guerriero 2003; Hopgood 2005), thus becoming a “Ur-form of life”, namely an archetype that generates other models based upon its principles (Jones 2017; Hendrickson 1998). Accordingly, figures such as Che Guevara or James Dean, as well as musicians such as Elvis Presley (“the other Jesus”) or Claude François are the object of proper “popular cults” (Browne 1980; Boudewijnse and Heimbrock 1990), to the extent that scholars define them as “cultural saints” (Laderman and Leon 2003: 447-448). The modelisation of such “cultural sanctity” is quite far from the “everyday” ideal of sanctity promoted by the 20th-century Catholic doctrine, especially after the Second Vatican Council, and rather results closer to the popular and stereotyped figure of the hero-saint, which derives from early modernity (Royo Mejía 1995; Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri and Guidorizzi 2012). In order to point out, firstly, the “de-generation” of the narrative program and semantic categories of sanctity (i.e. their elaboration in contexts and textual genres different from the original ones) and, secondly, the conscious embodiment and staging of this form of life by individual subjects (Salvatore 2015; Spaziante 2016), we focus on the case study of the discourse surrounding popular music. Indeed, especially after the 20th-century avant-gardes, which were often defined as “ascetic” (Riley 1998), at least since Edgar Morin (1957), the analogy between saints and stars is a consumed trope within pop culture (Schmitt 1983). For musicians, just like for Catholic saints, the unavoidable viaticum to sanctity is represented by death, generally tragic and premature (Yarrow 2016: 145-146). The event of death legitimizes the (retrospective) interpretation of their whole life through hagiographic narrative structures and semantic categories, such as the heroism determined by their exceptional talent, the perseverance in living and promoting a peculiar lifestyle, and “the authenticity of believing so much in their music that they effectively died for it” (Till 2010: 119). This kind of discourse shapes in turn a life model that is consciously taken in charge and pursued by Subjects. The most notable case is that of jazz master John Coltrane (1926-1967), who, after his conversion to a universalistic, mystical God, and to the once-despised language of free jazz, explicitly manifests the intention to reach sanctity in and through his music (Pedrazzi 2008; Whyton 2013). The embodiment and staging of sanctity by Coltrane received a positive Sanction after his death, both with the institution of the St. John William Coltrane African Orthodox Church (Baham 2015; Howison 2012) and the recurring interpretation of his late music (1964-1967: A Love Supreme, Ascension, Meditations, Expression) as a miraculous act and, just like the miraculous and virtuous acts of the canonized saints, a testimony inviting to imitation.