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Draft

A sin-eater is a person who consumes a ritual meal in order to magically take on the sins of a person or household. The food was believed to absorb the sins of a recently deceased person, thus absolving the deceased's soul. Consequently, sin-eaters carried the sins of all people whose souls they "ate."

Sin-eating was most commonly practiced by Christians in 18th- and 19th-century England, Scotland, and Wales.

In anthropology and the study of folklore, sin-eating is classified as an apotropaic, or protective, ritual.

The ritual
Villages typically had a designated sin-eater (a man or woman) who was hired by families of the recently deceased. Food (typically bread) and drink (wine or beer) was placed on or near the corpse. The sin-eater consumed the meal while the family watched. By digesting the meal, the deceased's sins were passed onto the sin-eater.

In addition to absolving a person's soul of sin, the sin-eating practice was also believed to prevent corpses from walking after death.

Sin-eaters were usually poor and paid very little, about a half-shilling; the promise of food and drink was often incentive enough. Because of the severe religious beliefs of the period, one had to be desperate or non-Christian to accumulate sins on behalf of others, and sin-eaters were harshly stigmatized in their communities. As Scottish writer Catherine Sinclair noted, sin-eaters were willing "to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage."

Writing in the early 1800s, antiquarian John Brand describes how the ritual was performed in one English county:

"In the county of Hereford was an old custome at funeralls to hire poor people, who were to take upon them the sinnes of the party deceased. One of them (he was a long, leane, ugly, lamentable poor raskal), I remember, lived in a cottage on Rosse highway. The manner was, that when the corpse was brought out of the house, and layd on the biere, a loafe of bread was brought out and delivered to the sinne eater, over the corpse, as also a mazar bowle, of maple, full of beer (which he was to drink up), and sixpence in money."