The Psychology and Architecture of Decay Aversion.
Decarnis is the visceral disgust and grief of inhabiting a mortal, decomposing, excreting body. It is the internalized shame of our porous, aging, and needy animal nature. This fear originates in the primordial equation of human shame: *I produce what I despise, and I will become what I produce.*
*The body, which had moved freely, suddenly appeared grotesque... not punishment but misunderstanding.*
This weight demands a cultural counterweight—historically met by the pursuit of honor, glory, and transcendent meaning (e.g., Homer's Achilles). This is the initial psychosocial adaptation to avoid anonymous animal existence.
The Labyrinth of Taboos (|〄|) is the maze-like cultural architecture constructed to manage Decarnis. Its purpose is to hide decay processes and distance humans from their material, cyclical reality. The complexity of the structure is the mechanism itself, keeping the "Minotaur" (our animal self) hidden.
Semantic Doubling: The word "soil" carries a double meaning of life-giving fertility and degrading filth. Phrases like Greek _chōma_ ("eating earth" = defeat) function as linguistic walls, fusing concepts of groundedness with humiliation.
Purification and Sealing: Practices like embalming, sealed caskets, and cremation are designed to prevent sensory contact with the processes of decomposition, ensuring the deceased body maintains a state of symbolic *purity* rather than undergoing material *transformation*.
**Separation and Concealment:** The physical segregation of bodily processes. This includes the privatization of bathrooms, the placement of slaughterhouses and landfills *outside* communities, and the separation of cemeteries from living spaces.
**Vertical Geography:** The mapping of purity onto elevation (**Heaven = UP**) and pollution onto depth (**Hell = DOWN**). This symbolic system reinforces the avoidance of the earth and its material cycles as inherently impure.
The bioart installation *Worms Altar: Make Amends* serves as a practical methodology for exiting the Labyrinth. Its purpose is to reverse the cultural mechanisms of hiding and silencing.
The pedestal is engraved: **"See no evil, Speak no evil, Hear no evil."** This explicitly names the cultural mechanism of deliberate blindness that the Labyrinth requires to function.
By making the **living vermicompost transparently visible** and incorporating a ritualized "thank you" to the worms, the altar inverts the Labyrinth's rules, inviting participants to engage in **conscious, embodied acknowledgment** of decay-as-renewal.
"Navigate out of the maze through conscious, embodied engagement."
(*Worms Altar: Make Amends*)