of the community but also ostracized from it. The Sin Eater was typically a man who spent much of his life alone, disparaged by the community he served – and yet, in one way at least, the most important member of that community for without him no-one who had sinned could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. At the same time, he was regarded as unclean, as strange and mad – and yet, if he was unclean, it was because of the sins he was eating. The sins of the community, not his own.
We often find this solitariness among people of spiritual power. A time of aloneness is a requisite in many shamanic initiations and in some traditions the shaman will also live on the outskirts of the community, representing in a physical and symbolic way his dwelling on the threshold or boundary, the ‘betwixt and between’ place of human and spiritual connection. In our fairytales and myths, as well, crones, witches, and other unusual people tend to live alone in woods and shadowlands.
The emotional hardship of the Sin Eater’s life, along with the decline of spiritual belief in our modern cities are perhaps two of the reasons why sin eating is no longer a central practice in funerary rites, although it survives symbolically. In Ireland, for example, it is still common for the corpse to lie in state in the family home and at one such funeral I attended in the mid-1980s, a service was held over the coffin and our host then offered a glass of wine and a funeral biscuit to each guest, handing it to us across the coffin itself. The burial-cakes still made in parts of rural England (Shropshire and Cumberland, for example) are also symbolic relics of the sin eating tradition.
In other countries sin eating still continues in