The Incorruptible Flesh Quotes

“An upturned axis mundi, a sad parody of the pure, healthy and luxuriously verdant tree, of vigorous and fecund vegetation overflowing with life-giving juices and sap; a feeble shadow of arboreal life, of aromatic and salutory herbs, Man, nature’s discard, a living and walking incarnation of decay, like a contaminated and worm-infested blood clot, was the chosen pasture ground of the immortal earthworm which gnaws and devours (‘esca vermis qui semper rodit et comedit immortalis’), a lurid ‘thing’, which rotted and became contaminated. A bag of excrement producing nothing but a foul stench, infected blood, purulent sperm, a ball of filth. ‘Man is nothing but fetid sperm, a bag of dung and food for worms. After man comes the worm, and after the worm, stench and horror. And thus is every man’s fate’ (St Bernard).”
― Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore