The Strange Religious Meaning of Worms

Saint Roth and Good Worms

In the curious medieval icon (above), St. Roch a 14th-century patron saint of plague victims is famously depicted pointing to a long worm wiggling out of his upper thigh.

The holy man contracted worms while serving plague victims in Italy.  The worm is the means by which he became Christ-like. It is good because it serves as a badge of honor and a visible reminder of Christian love. St. Roth willingly endured worms burrowing through his body in exchange for the opportunity of serving the sick and marginalized. 

God made everything good, even worms! God must have thought they were really good since he decided to make over 66,000 species from round worms to segmented worms to flat worms. Worms help to decompose organic waste, recycle nutrients, and they make tunnels in the soil which helps plants and grass grow. 'Medical maggots' are used by some doctors to eat away rotten flesh (necrotic tissue) in wounds. 

When I think about my own encounter with worms I feel a little guilty. I have stepped on quite a few earthworms who came out from the ground on rainy days. What’s worse, I have inadvertently tortured over a hundred worms by impaling them with a fishing hook as they wriggled away from its deadly point. If it’s any consolation, I once shared an apple with a worm. After devouring the juicy apple on one side I rolled it over in my hand and to my utter horror there was a bruise with a wormhole in the middle. Immediately, I spit the chunk I had bitten off out of my mouth and rinsed with water.  

Parasitic Worms and Sin

Parasitic worms are the scariest kind. They usually enter the body in three main ways: by swallowing contaminated food or water, by larvae penetrating the skin, or by insect bites. Once inside, they typically travel to the intestines to feed, grow, and reproduce. Some parasitic worms do not need to be swallowed. The tiny larvae can actively burrow directly through the skin! This most commonly occurs when walking barefoot on soil or sand that contains infected human or animal stool. 

There’s a spiritual parallel here: just as a parasitic worm subtly slips inside a host, remaining unseen while eating away at the body's nutrients and causing internal rot, venial and mortal sins quietly devour a soul’s spiritual health from the inside out. 

There are some worms that use a mosquito bite as a ‘trojan horse’ to enter your body. When an infected mosquito bites a human, it can transmit microscopic larvae into the bloodstream, which then develop into adult worms (such as those that cause river blindness or lymphatic filariasis).

That sounds like biblical curse that someone like Job would have endured. The word "worm" appears in the Bible around 15 to 25 times. The Hebrew and Greek variations of the word most frequently refer to maggots or larvae associated with decay.  

The Worm Curse

If you recall, ‘manna’ was a miraculous bread that rained down from heaven for Moses and the people in the desert wandering period. God tested the Israelites' trust in him as a provider so he insisted that the daily bread (manna) had to be consumed each day and not stored. When the Israelites disobeyed God's command and tried to hoard the daily manna until morning, the leftover food bred worms and began to stink. The manna worms served a reminder to trust in God (Exodus 16:20). 

After that episode, worms became associated with curses. For covenant disobedience, God warned Israel, "You will plant and cultivate vineyards but not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them” (Deut 28:39). Here, worms acted as a curse and an agent of divine judgment. On a separate occasion, God directed worms to attack plants that were meant to give shade so that they withered, exposing the unfaithful people to the burning sun (Jonah 4:7).

What about humans? Can humans be cursed with worms? 

There is a scriptural foundation for this in the book of Acts. When King Herod (the son of Herod the Great, the one that Jesus stood before in his trial) accepted the praise of a crowd calling him a god, an angel of the Lord struck him down for his arrogance. He was eaten by worms and breathed his last…“On the appointed day Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people (see Acts 12:21-23). 

What’s really interesting is that his father, Herod the Great (the one that tried to kill Jesus as a baby) also died from worms! Like father, like son. Actually, the worms escaped his body by wiggling out of his generative organ, the same genitals that had a role in producing Herod Agrippa. In his work Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus graphically wrote about it:

  “But now Herod’s distemper greatly increased upon him, after a severe manner; and this by God’s judgment upon him for his sins. For a fire glowed in him slowly, which did not so much appear to the touch outwardly, as it augmented his pains inwardly. For it brought upon him a vehement appetite to eating, which he could not avoid to supply with one sort of food or other. His entrails were also exulcerated; and the chief violence of his pain lay in his colon. An aqueous and transparent liquor also had settled itself about his feet: and a like matter afflicted him at the bottom of his belly. Nay farther, his privy member was putrified, and produced worms (genital gangrene). And when he sat upright, he had difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome on account of the stench of his breath, and the quickness of its returns” (Book 17, Chapter 6, Section 5).

That sounds like poetic justice that the two Herods who both exalted themselves over Jesus died that way. 

Speaking of poetic justice no one is better at it than Dante Algierre. In his Inferno, Dante has a field day with worm imagery. Before entering Hell proper, Dante encounters the Ignavi (those who refused to take a moral stand in life). As they endlessly chase a blank banner, they are stung by wasps and hornets. Their trickling blood and tears are lapped up by loathsome maggots and worms at their feet. 

In Circle Three (Gluttony), Dante famously refers to the three-headed beast Cerberus as il gran vermo ("the great worm"). And then there’s Lucifer…In the deepest, frozen circle of Hell (Canto 34), Virgil refers to Satan as "the wicked worm that pierces through the world". Dante saw the devil as a parasitic entity eating through the core of God's creation.

‘You are a Mere Worm’

The worm was also used by God and others as a metaphor to indicate humility, lowliness, moral corruption or death and decay of the body. 

In the book of Job, the worm is used symbolically to show the extreme feebleness of man and to display his moral corruption. “I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister” (Job 17:14). “How much less man, that is a worm (a maggot)? and the son of man, which is a worm?” (Job 25:6). On one occasion God called Jacob and all the Israelites worms, "Do not fear, you worm Jacob, you maggot Israel; I will help you—oracle of the LORD, your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah 41:14). In other words, God is telling Jacob, ‘in your weakness and smallness you have no hope of saving yourselves’. 

Worms that Signaled Death, Decomposition and Damnation

Salvation, redemption and divinization of both body and soul stand in stark contrast to the image of the body as food for the worms as highlighted in Job. “They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them” (Job 21:26)...”the worm shall feed sweetly on him; he shall be no more remembered; and wickedness shall be broken as a tree (Job 24:20).

This is not the fate for everyone you know- that is 'to be eaten by worms'. Think of the 'Incorruptibles', that privlleged group of Catholic saints whose bodies have not decayed. 

Worms are also associated with the torment of hell. Isaiah speaks of the fate of those who rebel against God, stating "their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched". Jesus directly quotes this Mark chapter 9 to describe hell (Gehenna) the lowest place of eternal spiritual ruin. “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched (Mark 9:47-48). 

Of course Hollywood too picked up on the spiritual damnation theme of worms. Besides a few unserious B-movies as indicated by the titles, Squirm (1976) and Slither (2006), there’s an interesting scene in the 2022 exorcism film called, Prey for the Devil.

In the worm scene, a tormented, possessed little girl holds her hands over her face and then begins to growl . The back side of her hands tear open into two wounds that bear resemblance to the stigmata (nail wounds of Christ) and then little white worms slightly longer than maggots slither out one by one from her wounds and fall to the ground. 

The Crimson Worm, Jesus and the Cross

Remember when Jesus was on the cross and he cried out, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?”, that is, ”My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46)?  It sounded like Jesus was despairing and losing trust in the Father’s plan. On the contrary, he was quoting Psalm 22 to demonstrate that the plan of salvation was actively unfolding. It was a tradition for the ancient rabbis to speak aloud the first verse to reference the entire Psalm. Jesus was calling us to see that Psalm 22, called the prayer of an innocent man, was a prophecy about him. 

”My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why so far from my call for help,from my cries of anguish? My God, I call by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I have no relief. Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the glory of Israel.In you our fathers trusted; they trusted and you rescued them. To you they cried out and they escaped; in you they trusted and were not disappointed. But I am a worm, not a man, scorned by men, despised by the people”(Psam 22:2-7).

The Hebrew name for this particular ‘worm’ in Psalm 22 is tola’at shani which loosely means, ‘Crimson Worm’. 

There are a series of incredible similarities between the life cycle of a Crimson Worm and the death and resurrection of Jesus…

• When the female crimson worm is ready to reproduce, she instinctively climbs up a tree or wooden post and attaches herself permanently. Her shell secures so tightly to the wood that she cannot be removed without tearing her body apart. Similarly, Jesus willingly allowed Himself to be nailed to the wood of the cross to give divine life to humanity.
• As the mother worm births her young, she secretes a deep, reddish-fluid (crimson) dye that permanently stains her offspring and the wood. This mirrors the salvific blood of Jesus shed on the cross. Incidentally, the dye was used for the vestments of the Jewish High Priest.  
• The newborn larvae, protected beneath the mother's hard shell, feed on her living body until she dies. Similarly, Jesus comes to us in the Eucharist as spiritual nourishment, as food and drink for the hungry and thirsty; “This is my body given for you”-Jesus. 
• And here’s the kicker…For exactly three days after attaching to the wood, the worm's body loses its red pigment and transforms into a snow-white wax that flakes off like wool. This parallels Jesus dying, laying in the tomb for three days, and resurrecting. It also visually echoes Isaiah 1:18 “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." 

According to his medieval biographer, Thomas of Celano, Saint Francis would regularly stop while walking along muddy roads to carefully pick up earthworms and move them to the safety of the grass so they would not be trampled by travelers. He believed, based on Psalm 22, that Christ humbled Himself to the level of a worm for humanity. Since they resmeble Jesus, every lowly worm deserved ultimate reverence and protection. 

That goes for all of us lowly worms too.