One prominent figure in 18th and 19th century villages in certain parts of the United Kingdom was the sin eater. If a person died unexpectedly before he could receive last rites, his loved ones would serve food and a beverage over his body to the local sin eater. The sin eater, by consuming the food, was thought to remove all sins from the soul of the deceased by taking them onto himself--just as if he had committed the sins on his own.
Because a sin eater would be considered to be guilty of every depravity he absorbed and accumulated during the course of his career, he was a social pariah. Like a lawyer, people reviled him until they actually needed his services. He was paid a small pittance (equivalent to maybe $2 in today's currency) for performing his task and would then be turned out of the house as soon as his meal had been completed. It was considered very bad karma to look a sin eater in the eye. Any food left on a sin eater's plate after the performance of his task would be burned in order to avoid any other person ingesting it at the risk of damnation.
In some areas, sin eaters eventually were called out on all types of deaths, not just for those individuals who had expired unexpectedly without receiving last rites.
The last known professional sin eater was a Welshman named Richard Munslow, who died in 1906. Atypically, he was a well-to-do landowner and farmer.
Although the concept of someone else paying for your sins is a basic tenet of Christianity, most organized Christian denominations frowned upon the ritual of a local sin eater trying to do so. The practice of sin eating was also somewhat akin to a Jewish tradition where a priest would select a goat to represent the sins of the Jewish people and release it into the wilderness during Yom Kippur.
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