While looking at an old issue of Psychology Today this weekend I saw a small pull-out quote in an article which read as follows: "Sin Eaters," ancient nomads who wandered the countryside absorbing others’ pain, were later chased away, taking sorrow with them and leaving villages purged.
This quote, for some odd reason, really piqued my interest. I’ve studied religions, myth and folklore for a long time, but I had not heard of this. A quick Internet search brought several hits, but what I largely found was an absence of where this term actually originated though it does seem to be found in several ancient cultures. The hits I read had a darkness about them—and I found my research more and more troubling.
Apparently a movie was made in 2003 called "The Order," which dealt with this concept, but it must have been a total bomb as I couldn’t find any reviews of people who had actually seen it. A shamanic publication called Sacred Hoop had a personal recounting by a man named Ross Heaven who met and interviewed a sin eater in Wales.
His story gave me the willies, frankly, but the more I researched, the more I felt as though Psychology Today had somehow gentrified their definition. Heaven says sin eating was an ancient tradition, practiced in many countries of the world, and integrated into the Catholic ritual of the last rites. It is supposedly derived from the 'scapegoat' described in Leviticus xvi. (vs21 and 22), where the wrongdoings of another are transferred to an innocent. In the Hebrew ritual of the scapegoat, Aaron confessed all the sins of the children of Israel on the Day of Atonement, above the head of a live goat, that was then sent out into the wilderness to die, symbolically bearing their sins. As a shamanic tradition, a sin eater would be employed by the family of a deceased person, or sometimes by the Church, to eat a last meal of bread and salt from the belly of the corpse as it lay in state. By so doing it was believed that the sins of the dead person would be absorbed and the deceased would have clear passage to the hereafter. Apparently the sin eater was sometimes called in to absorb the sins of a living person—and that sounded like driving out demons.
For some reason, the profession or calling of sin eating seems like selling your soul to the devil—Damn Yankees all over again. Dark and dirty work that somebody had to do, I guess. But I also know that ancient traditions usually have their foundation in truth and many customs morph into modern usage.
I would like to make a Sin-Eater Soul Collage card, but I would like a scholarly source before I continue. Do any of you know more about this as a pagan or cross-cultural tradition?
