#sin-eating

I can assure y'all you don't know wtf a sin-eater is. Just from a Euro-centric perspective, y'all are plum fucking lost without a paddle, swimming downward dog with your ass exposed and kissing the sun.

It was never glorified. It was never idolized. It was never about singing songs to the dead and clearing their mortal coils with the goodness of your intention.

Modern day halfwits tote it around like a badge of honor as if its roots are not dredged in mud. As if it was not a pus-filled blight upon your town that you could never hope to pop.

A sin-eater was an outcast, a blighted loner abandoned by their town until it was convenient to draw them into your home. They were a lowly, ridiculed and abused resource. They are not noble or revered or worthy of praise. They were the lepers of society invited BY THE FAMILY into the home of the dying to take the last meal off their literal chest.

Y'all will readily romanticize the burning times and the cursed spirits of closed cultures, but I find y'all absolutely unworthy of breathing air for completely ignoring the history of a practice to pretend you're some noble, solo initiate who can go from tomb to tomb on a soul already reeking of decay. You are without knowledge or pride, and you pretend to degrade yourself to the masses for a crumb of recognition that is not yours by right or merit. Fuck off

So it’s actually a recent thing, and it took a little while to figure out how to bring the practice into the modern world. For those not in the know, sin-eating is a folk tradition where someone (usually a poor person) was paid to consume a ritual meal over/off of the corpse of someone recently deceased in order to absorb any lingering sins and expediate the journey to heaven. They were then believed to suffer the consequences of someone else’s sins after their death. The concept itself comes from Welsh Christianity and was brought to Appalachia by immigrants along with a whole slew of other traditions.

Obviously, not a lot of mourners are asking for someone to come around and eat food off their loved ones these days, so the practice has died out. But the need is still present; people die suddenly, ghosts linger, people may not have access to priests. So the challenge comes down to finding away to serve this role in modernity.

Those who know me know that I work closely with the spirits of nearby cemeteries. Being permanently stuck between heaven and hell, I approached one of these dear spirits with the idea of reviving the practice of sin-eating for my community. At that point, through some meditations and divination, I was given the “go-ahead” as it were.

The industrial revolution saw a mass migration of the population from the countryside to towns and cities and with it the loss of many rural traditions. In addition, the established church was vehemently opposed to superstitious practices such as sin-eating, regarding it as a heretical practice and so as it tightened its hold on society, promoting sobriety, morality, and education, it discouraged…

Never ones to look a gift horse in the eye the Catholic church offered, for a price of course, for a sinner to smooth their passage to heaven by repenting of their sins and dying in a state of grace. With the rise and ultimate ascendancy of Protestantism in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries, there was no easy Get out of Hell card for sinners to play. That is perhaps why, during the uneasy…