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. Sin-eaters, as a consequence, carried the sins of all people whose sins they had eaten. Cultural anthropologists and folklorists classify sin-eating as a form of ritual, it is most commonly associated with Wales, English counties bordering Wales and Welsh culture.
Attestations
History
Although, there have been analogous instances of sin-eaters throughout history, the questions of how common the practice was, when it was practised, and what the interactions between sin-eaters, common people, and religious authorities were, remain largely unstudied by folklore academics. In Meso-American civilization, Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of earth, motherhood and fertility, had a redemptive role in religious practices. At the end of an individual's life, he was allowed to confess his misdeeds to this deity, and according to legend she would cleanse his soul by "eating its filth". In wider Christian practice, Jesus of Nazareth has been interpreted as a universal archetype for sin-eaters, offering his life to atone or purify all of humanity of their sins. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica states in its article on "sin eaters":
The term "Sin-eater" appears to derive from Welsh culture and is most often associated with Wales itself and in the English Counties bordering Wales Diarist John Aubrey, in the earliest source on the practice, wrote that "an old Custome" in Herefordshire had been John Bagford, includes the following description of the sin-eating ritual in his Letter on Leland's Collectanea, i. 76. By 1838, Catherine Sinclair noted the practice was in decline but that it continued in the locality: 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: The 1926 book Funeral Customs by Bertram S. Puckle mentions the sin-eater:
Popular culture
"The Sins of the Fathers", a 1972 episode of the American television seriesNight Gallery, features Richard Thomas as a sin-eater in medieval Wales. 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. Margaret Atwood wrote a short story titled "The Sin-Eater". Sin-Eater is the name of a Marvel Comics villain. The Sin-Eater was a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio feature from 1981. 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 movieThe 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. In the film The Bourne Legacy, the subject is used: Buyer tells Cross that they are "sin eaters", doing the "morally indefensible" but absolutely necessary thing, "so that the rest of our cause can stay pure." The story is that a village has one person who is treated extremely well and whose job is to eat food symbolic of people's sins, so that he assumes all their sins so that they can die in a state of grace. The sin eater is extremely old and weighed down by the sins of hundreds of people. A young man is being groomed to be a sin-eater. The old sin-eater dies and the first task the pure and innocent young man must do is eat the sins of the sin-eater including the lifetime of sins he has consumed which, by extension, includes the sins of all the thousands that have been absorbed by endless generations of sin-eaters. In other words, lured by the comforts to be provided by the adoring villagers, the young man becomes the most damnable person in history. His only hope is that one day, many years later, another young man will be similarly lured into eating all the sins that this young man will have to bear. The American TV showSleepy 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. 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." The White Wolf publishing company's role-playing game is named for the concept, though it never directly references the actual ritual practice. 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. The 2020 fantasy mystery novel Sin Eater by Megan Campisi is narrated by a woman sentenced to become a sin eater. In the novel different sins are symbolized by different foods, and when foods appear for sins not confessed, the main character takes it upon herself to solve the mystery.
