A sin-eater is a person who consumes a ritual meal in order to spiritually take on the sins of a deceased person. The food was believed to absorb the sins of a recently dead person, thus absolving the soul of the person.
While there have been analogous instances of sin-eaters throughout history, the questions of how common the practice was, when it was practiced, and what the interactions between sin-eaters, common people, and religious authorities remain largely unstudied by folklore academics.[citation needed]
In Meso-American civilisation, Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of vice, purification, steam baths, lust and filth, and a patroness of adulterers (her name literally means 'Sacred Filth'), had a redemptive role in religious practices. At the end of an individual's life, they were allowed to confess misdeeds to this deity, and according to legend she would cleanse the soul by "eating its filth".
A symbolic survival of [sin-eating] was witnessed as recently as 1893 at Market Drayton, Shropshire. After a preliminary service had been held over the coffin in the house, a woman poured out a glass of wine for each bearer and handed it to him across the coffin with a 'funeral biscuit.' In Upper Bavaria sin-eating still survives: a corpse cake is placed on the breast of the dead and then eaten by the nearest relative, while in the Balkan peninsula a small bread image of the deceased is made and eaten by the survivors of the family. The Dutch doed-koecks or 'dead-cakes', marked with the initials of the deceased, introduced into America in the 17th century, were long given to the attendants at funerals in old New York. The 'burial-cakes' which are still made in parts of rural England, for example Lincolnshire and Cumberland, are almost certainly a relic of sin-eating.[2]
Seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey, in the earliest source on the practice, wrote that "an old Custome" in Herefordshire had been
at funerals to hire poor people, who were to take upon them all the sins of the party deceased. One of them I remember lived in a Cottage on Rosse-high way. (He was a long, lean, ugly, lamentable Raskel.) The manner was that when the corpse was brought out of the house, and laid on the Bière; a Loaf of bread was brought out, and delivered to the Sine-eater over the corpse, and also a Mazar-bowl of maple (Gossips bowl) full of beer, which he was to drink up, and sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he took upon him (ipso facto) all the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking after they were dead.[3]
Notice was given to an old sire before the door of the house, when some of the family came out and furnished him with a cricket [low stool], on which he sat down facing the door; then they gave him a groat which he put in his pocket, a crust of bread which he ate, and a bowl of ale which he drank off at a draught. After this he got up from the cricket and pronounced the case and rest of the soul departed, for which he would pawn his own soul.
By 1838, Catherine Sinclair noted the practice was in decline but that it continued in the locality:
A strange popish custom prevailed in Monmouthshire and other Western counties until recently. Many funerals were attended by a professed "sin-eater," hired to take upon him the sins of the deceased. By swallowing bread and beer, with a suitable ceremony before the corpse, he was supposed to free it from every penalty for past offences, appropriating the punishment to himself. Men who undertook so daring an imposture must all have been infidels, willing, apparently, like Esau, to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage.[4]
A local legend in Shropshire, England, concerns the grave of Richard Munslow, who died in 1906, said to be the last sin-eater of the area. Unusually, Munslow was not poor or an outcast, instead being a wealthy farmer from an established family. Munslow may have revived the custom after the deaths of three of his children in a week 1870 due to scarlet fever.[5] In the words of local Reverend Norman Morris of Ratlinghope, "It was a very odd practice and would not have been approved of by the church but I suspect the vicar often turned a blind eye to the practice."[6] At the funeral of anyone who had died without confessing their sins, a sin-eater would take on the sins of the deceased by eating a loaf of bread and drinking ale out of a wooden bowl passed over the coffin, and make a short speech:[5][6]
I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man, that ye walk not down the lanes or in our meadows. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul. Amen.[5]
The 1926 book Funeral Customs by Bertram S. Puckle mentions the sin-eater:
Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, allegedly saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.[7]
In September 2022 occultist Sean Wilde performed the traditional sin eating ritual in Guelph, Ontario.[8]
"The Sin Eater" is an episode of Suspense (radio drama) which originally aired on July 8, 1962. The setting is rural Appalachia, with characters of Welsh heritage.
"The Sins of the Fathers", a 1972 episode of the American television series Night Gallery, features Richard Thomas as a sin-eater in medieval Wales.
Published in 1977 by Duckworth Books, The Sin Eater was the first of British writer Alice Thomas Ellis's many novels. It "exposed the hidden rancours of Irish, Welsh and English," in the words of journalist and writer Clare Colvin.[10] Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Abby Geni comments, "The story orbits around the Captain, a failing patriarch, and the family who have gathered at his bedside. There are no ghosts or disembodied voices here. Instead, lovely Rose organises meals and cricket matches. Angela, visiting from out of town, vies with Rose for control of the proceedings. Awkward Ermyn searches for her place in the group. Servants lurk on the sidelines. The story is ripe with shadows and terror. An unclassifiable menace seeps through the book like a fog."[11]
The 1978 TV miniseries The Dark Secret of Harvest Home features a funeral scene wherein all the mourners in attendance avert their faces as a repudiated fellow designated the sin-eater dines upon a symbolic meal, which includes a coin pressed into a cheese, thereby taking the deceased's transgressions in life upon himself.
Sin Eater is the title of a 2020 mystery novel by Megan Campisi set in an alternate Elizabethan England.[13]
In Patrick O’Brian's novel Master and Commander, set aboard a 19th-century British navy ship, the crew learns that a new shipmate was once a sin-eater, and immediately begin to shun and persecute him. To protect him, the ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin, gives him a post as his assistant.
The 2003 movie The Order is a fictional horror story revolving around the investigation of the suspicious death of an excommunicated priest and the discovery of a sin-eater headquartered in Rome.
The 2004 movie The Final Cut is set in a world where memories are recorded, and then "cut" into positive hagiographies on the person's death; the "cutters" are referred to as sin-eaters.
The 2007 film The Last Sin Eater tells the story of a community of Welsh immigrants in Appalachia, 1850. The sin-eater of the community is seen through the eyes of ten-year-old Cadi Forbes.
In the film The Bourne Legacy (2012), a central character who leads a US government black ops program describes himself and his team as sin-eaters, doing the "morally indefensible" but absolutely necessary thing, "so that the rest of our cause can stay pure."[14]
The American TV show Sleepy Hollow used the term Sin-Eater as the title of Season 1, episode 6, as a way to introduce another character on the show that is a sin-eater.
The American TV show Lucifer used the term Sin-Eater as the title of season 2, episode 3, to refer to the content moderation employees of a fictional social media company. The American TV show Arrow did so too in the season 5, episode 14, referring to a flash-back story of Anatoli Knyazev telling Oliver Queen he acts as a sin-eater.
In the American TV show Succession, Gerri, Waystar Royco's general counsel, suggests to Tom Wambsgans that he become the family sin-eater and destroy evidence of illegal activities aboard the company's cruise lines, "Have you ever heard of the sin cake eater? He would come to the funeral and he would eat all the little cakes they’d lay out on the corpse. He ate up all the sins. And you know what? The sin cake eater was very well paid. And so long as there was another one who came along after he died, it all worked out. So this might not be the best situation, but there are harder jobs and you get to eat [an amazing amount] of cake."[15]
The comic series Finder features a main character who is a sin-eater, and thus despised by his mother's culture as the lowest member of their society.
In the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, sin-eaters are recurring hostile entities that aim to devour all living beings in The First, mindless monsters driven by insatiable hunger for living aether. The stronger sin-eaters are capable of "forgiving" the creatures they attack, gruesomely and permanently mutating them into newborn sin-eaters. Most of these creatures tend to be named as "forgiven" sins (Forgiven Cowardice, Forgiven Cruelty, Forgiven Hypocrisy, etc.). The strongest sin-eaters are known as Lightwardens.
In A Breath of Snow and Ashes, the sixth book in the Outlander series of novels by Diana Gabaldon, Roger Wakefield presides over the funeral of Hiram Crombie's mother-in-law, Mrs. Wilson, where a sin-eater makes an appearance.
The Sin Eater's Daughter is a YA fantasy novel written by Melinda Salisbury which includes a version of the practice and was published on February 24, 2015.
"My Soul’s Demise", a song by Blackbriar, is about the dread of a sin-eater.
In the American TV anthology Fargo season 5, episode 3, a flashback portrays a possible sixteenth century incarnation of the character Ole Munch as being a sin-eater, definitively confirmed by his further declarations in the finale, episode 10, entitled "Bisquik".
Related Research Articles
A funeral is a ceremony connected with the final disposition of a corpse, such as a burial or cremation, with the attendant observances. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember and respect the dead, from interment, to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in their honour. Customs vary between cultures and religious groups. Funerals have both normative and legal components. Common secular motivations for funerals include mourning the deceased, celebrating their life, and offering support and sympathy to the bereaved; additionally, funerals may have religious aspects that are intended to help the soul of the deceased reach the afterlife, resurrection or reincarnation.
The veneration of the dead, including one's ancestors, is based on love and respect for the deceased. In some cultures, it is related to beliefs that the dead have a continued existence, and may possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living. Some groups venerate their direct, familial ancestors. Certain religious groups, in particular the Eastern Orthodox Churches, Catholic Church and Anglican Church venerate saints as intercessors with God; the latter also believes in prayer for departed souls in Purgatory. Other religious groups, however, consider veneration of the dead to be idolatry and a sin.
Hungry ghost is a term in Buddhism, and Chinese traditional religion, representing beings who are driven by intense emotional needs in an animalistic way. The terms 餓鬼èguǐ literally "hungry ghost", are the Chinese translation of the term preta in Buddhism which is a Sanskrit word. "Hungry ghosts" play a role in Chinese Buddhism and Taoism as well as in Chinese folk religion. The term is not to be confused with the generic term for "ghost" or damnation, 鬼guǐ. The understanding is that all people become such a regular ghost when they die, and would then slowly weaken and eventually die a second time.
The Order, also known as The Sin Eater, is a 2003 mystery thriller film written and directed by Brian Helgeland, starring Heath Ledger, Benno Fürmann, Mark Addy, and Shannyn Sossamon. Helgeland directed Ledger, Addy and Sossamon in the 2001 film A Knight's Tale. It was poorly received by critics and was a box office failure.
In Judaism, ritual washing, or ablution, takes two main forms. Tevilah (טְבִילָה) is a full body immersion in a mikveh, and netilat yadayim is the washing of the hands with a cup.
Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds like vultures and corvids. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar. The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds. Comparable practices are part of Zoroastrian burial rites where deceased are exposed to the elements and scavenger birds on stone structures called Dakhma. Few such places remain operational today due to religious marginalisation, urbanisation and the decimation of vulture populations.
Norse funerals, or the burial customs of Viking Age North Germanic Norsemen, are known both from archaeology and from historical accounts such as the Icelandic sagas and Old Norse poetry.
Preta, also known as hungry ghost, is the Sanskrit name for a type of supernatural being described in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religion as undergoing suffering greater than that of humans, particularly an extreme level of hunger and thirst. They have their origins in Indian religions and have been adopted into East Asian religions via the spread of Buddhism. Preta is often translated into English as "hungry ghost" from the Chinese and East Asian adaptations. In early sources such as the Petavatthu, they are much more varied. The descriptions below apply mainly in this narrower context. The development of the concept of the preta started with just thinking that it was the soul and ghost of a person once they died, but later the concept developed into a transient state between death and obtaining karmic reincarnation in accordance with the person's fate. In order to pass into the cycle of karmic reincarnation, the deceased's family must engage in a variety of rituals and offerings to guide the suffering spirit into its next life. If the family does not engage in these funerary rites, which last for one year, the soul could remain suffering as a preta for the rest of eternity.
The opening of the mouth ceremony was an ancient Egyptian ritual described in funerary texts such as the Pyramid Texts. From the Old Kingdom to the Roman Period, there is ample evidence of this ceremony, which was believed to give the deceased their fundamental senses to carry out tasks in the afterlife. Various practices were conducted on the corpse, including the use of specific instruments to touch body parts like the mouth and eyes. These customs were often linked with childbirth, which denoted rebirth and new beginnings. For instance, cutting bloody meat from animals as offerings for the deceased signified the birthing process, which typically involves blood, and represented the commencement of a new life. Additionally, tools like the peseshkef, which resembled the tail of a fish and were originally employed for cutting infants' umbilical cords, further emphasized the idea of "rebirth".
A Christian burial is the burial of a deceased person with specifically Christian rites; typically, in consecrated ground. Until recent times Christians generally objected to cremation because it interfered with the concept of the resurrection of a corpse, and practiced inhumation almost exclusively. Today this opposition has all but vanished among Protestants and Catholics alike, and this is rapidly becoming more common, although Eastern Orthodox Churches still mostly forbid cremation.
Among Buddhists, death is regarded as one of the occasions of major religious significance, both for the deceased and for the survivors. For the deceased, it marks the moment when the transition begins to a new mode of existence within the round of rebirths. When death occurs, all the karmic forces that the dead person accumulated during the course of their lifetime become activated and determine the next rebirth. For the living, death is a powerful reminder of the Buddha's teaching on impermanence; it also provides an opportunity to assist the deceased person as they transition to a new existence. There are several academic reviews of this subject. In Buddhism, death marks the transition from this life to the next for the deceased.
A soul cake, also known as a soulmass-cake, is a small round cake which is traditionally made for Halloween, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day to commemorate the dead in many Christian traditions. The cakes, often simply referred to as souls, are given out to soulers who go from door to door during the days of Allhallowtide singing and saying prayers "for the souls of the givers and their friends", especially the souls of deceased relatives, thought to be in Purgatory. The practice in England dates to the medieval period, and was continued there until the 1930s. In Sheffield and Cheshire, the custom has continued into modern times. In Lancashire and in the North-east of England soul cakes were known as Harcakes, a kind of thin parkin.
Absolution of the dead is a prayer for or a declaration of absolution of a dead person's sins that takes place at the person's religious funeral.
The shi was a ceremonial "personator" who represented a dead relative during ancient Chinese ancestral sacrifices. In a shi ceremony, the ancestral spirit supposedly would enter the descendant "corpse" personator, who would eat and drink sacrificial offerings and convey messages from the spirit. James Legge, an early translator of the Chinese classics, described shi personation ceremonies as "grand family reunions where the dead and the living met, eating and drinking together, where the living worshipped the dead, and the dead blessed the living." In modern terms, this ancient Chinese shi practice would be described as necromancy, mediumship, or spirit possession.
Shava sadhana is a Tantric sadhana in which the practitioner sits on a corpse for meditation. Shava sadhana is part of the vamachara ('heterodox') practice of worship, which is followed by the esoteric Tantra.
The use of death horoscopes in Tibetan Buddhism is an old practice that still sees application today. There are several types of horoscopes used in this religion, including a birth horoscope, a life forecast, an annual horoscope, a marriage horoscope, and a death horoscope. When casting the death horoscope, Tibetan Buddhists place great importance on the corpse, especially within the first three days following its death. There are several purposes for a death horoscope, and carrying out this practice must be done carefully. Additionally, a death horoscope is intended as a loving act for the dead, and a precautionary measure for the family of the deceased. Many Tibetans believe that when a death occurs within the family, other family members' lives are jeopardized, so this practice may be considered essential to both the living and dead. Tibetan Buddhists also believe that their deceased loved ones may spend a short period in hell to pay for sins in their past life.
Josang refers to one's immediate ancestors, offspring, a deceased relative or any unrelated soul; and worshipped as a god in Korean Shamanism. It is viewed as a supernatural being rather than blood relations, includes all immediate and extended family, both male and female, and all other deceased souls that influence the family. These include who died before marriage, or who died a tragic, untimely death.
Formerly in Spain, the pan de ánimas, pan de difunto or pan de muerto were breads that were prepared, blessed and offered to deceased loved ones during All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day.
"The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions" is the third episode of the fifth season of the American anthology black comedy–crime drama television series Fargo. It is the 44th overall episode of the series and was written by series creator Noah Hawley and directed by Donald Murphy. It originally aired on FX on November 28, 2023.
References
↑ Davidson, Hilda Ellis (1993). Boundaries & Thresholds. Thimble Press. p.85. ISBN9780903355414. Archived from the original on 28 March 2022. Retrieved 28 March 2022. It is this fear of what the dead in their uncontrollable power might cause which has brought forth apotropaic rites, protective rites against the dead. [...] One of these popular rites was the funeral rite of sin-eating, performed by a sin-eater, a man or woman. Through accepting the food and drink provided, he took upon himself the sins of the departed.
↑ Atwood, Margaret (1982). Weaver, Robert (ed.). Small Wonders: New stories by twelve distinguished Canadian authors. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. pp.11–23. ISBN0887941044.
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