Composting

Reverend Jen Bailey's composting religion, Yuria Celidwen's poetic account of the consciousness of nearly dying... Awe enables us to see the systems underlying the wonders of life and locate ourselves in relation to them.

Keltner presents 'composting religion' as a systemic metaphor — one of several intuitive, holistic images through which individuals sense the animating quality of complex living processes, including spiritual transformation.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis

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composting, 195–96, 199, 211, 216, 244, 246

The index entry for composting in Keltner's study maps its recurrence across discussions of religion, collective effervescence, and the systems dimension of awe, confirming its structural importance to the argument.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting

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Putrefaction or corruption takes place when a body becomes black. Then it stinks like dung and true solution follows. The elements are separated and destroyed. Many colors are afterwards developed, until the victory is obtained and everything is reunited.

Edinger's account of alchemical putrefactio articulates the structural analogue to composting in depth psychology: the necessary dissolution and blackening of matter as the precondition for reunification and new synthesis.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting

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In this decaying and distilling, Yuria would be animated by growth... A nekyia journey, like a near-death experience, involves decay—the dissolution of the self; a distillation—celestial feelings of ascent found in surrender, chaos, and death.

Keltner's account of the nekyia journey frames decay-and-distillation as the experiential archetype underlying composting, connecting it to cross-cultural mythologies of descent, dissolution, and regenerative return.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting

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Reverend Jen's epiphany in a church told her that she is loved by God... status quo meanings of society are stripped away and essential truths about our social lives are illuminated.

Keltner contextualizes the epiphanic dimension of awe from which the composting-religion metaphor arises, situating it within a broader noetic tradition of stripping away inherited forms to reveal essential truths.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023aside

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Putrefaction is to r[ot]... the conversion of a metal into an apparently inert mass or powder, the decomposition of a substance.

Abraham's lexicon of alchemical imagery documents putrefactio as the technical predecessor concept to composting, naming the same process of productive decomposition that composting metaphorizes in contemporary spiritual discourse.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998aside

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