#sin-eating

[pumucklx]

more sin-eating content!! I found two more excerpts from online papers and digitalized books and even a nice poem, regarding sin-eating. If anyone´s interested in the actual links to the papers I can add those below ;) in JSTOR we trust!!

[witchcraftingboop]

Since it's being romanticized and popularized again, let's briefly talk about it:

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

Google is free, just educate yourself, I promise it's not that hard 🤧

[pieandhotdogs]

How did you get involved with sin-eating?

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.

So I began taking a meal of bread and beer, along with a set of prayers and ritual tools, to my favorite cemetery and randsoming my own soul for those of the dead there, one grave at a time. It’s not exactly the same as traditional sin-eating, but it’s a step toward hopefully reinventing a nearly lost tradition of self-sacrifice.

[postscratchcomix]

Post-Scratch Comix #1 - “Greetings”

[frimleyblogger]

The Last Sin-Eater

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…

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[frimleyblogger]

Sin-Eaters

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…

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[pinkhasivna]

In corroborations of Aubrey's oft-quoted account of the sin-eater in Herefordshire, is the incident communicated to me by a resident in the neighbourhood of Hay. He was invited to attend the funeral of a sister of a farmer, near Crasswall, and to his surprise, was invited to gupstairs to the room where the body was lying. He went, with the brother and four bearers. At the bottom of the bed, at the foot of the coffin, was a little box, with a white cloth covering it. On it were placed a bottle of port owine, opened, and six glasses arranged around it. The glasses were filled and my informant was asked to drink. This he refused, saying he never took wine. "But you must drink, sir," said the old farmer, "It is like the Sacrament. It is to kill the sins of my sister."

Ella Mary Leather, The Folk-lore of Herefordshire: Collected from Oral and Printed Sources (emphasis Leather’s own) 

[pinkhasivna]

a question i’ve had for a long time is who eats the sin of the sin-eater but i think the truth is that the sin-eater, because of the amount of sin they carry, is closer to God than “ordinary” people. God eats the sin of the sin-eater. because the sin-eater doesn’t have their own sin, they have the sin of others, which is ultimately a selfless act, a mirror-image of the role of christ.