Sin Eater

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

In anthropology and the study of folklore, sin-eating is classified as apotropaic ritual and a form of religious magic.

Although the figure of the sin-eater has had various references in modern culture, the questions of how common the practice was, what regions of the world in which it was most common, and what the interactions between sin-eaters, common people, and religious authorities were, remain largely unstudied and in the realm of folklore.

In mythology, Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of earth, motherhood and fertility, had a redemptive role in the religious practices of the Meso-American civilization. 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".

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.

John Bagford, (ca.1650–1716) includes the following description of the sin-eating ritual in his letter on Leland’s Collectanea, i. 76. (as cited in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898)

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.

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:

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