1940s off-duty doctor or the cinema version of a period railway signalman. A gold chain and fob watch hung from the pocket of his waistcoat. So this was the madman I had been warned away from. He began to talk to me about flowers and herbs and his life story. He had been a Sin Eater.
THE SIN EATER
There is little written or known of Sin Eaters. It is 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. 21, 22, where the wrongdoings of another are ascribed 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. The Sin Eater was given a few coins for his trouble but other than that was avoided (literally ‘like the plague’) by the community who regarded him as sin-filled and unclean as a result of his work. That is why Sin Eaters usually lived at the edge of the village and children were warned away from them.
The role of the Sin Eater was, in essence, that of a shamanic healer. It was his job to remove negativity and the spirit of disease from the dead (and, often, the living) and make the gods available