November 18, 2021 • 28 mins
Some people used to believe that the surest way to get to heaven after you died was to have someone eat your sins. Ya know, so they were no longer on your soul? All you needed was some bread, some wine, and a Sin Eater. Helen and Matt talk about sins and the strange practice of sin eating.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is job Selete, where we talk about jobs that
are no longer jobs. This week we're learning about an
old job that may seem surprisingly easy. You might be
risking your soul, but still you get money for eating
people's sins. Today we're looking at sin eaters. Coming up
(00:24):
why we call it scapegoating, marionettes, tarnished souls, sinful bread souls,
finally a job MAT's never heard of, and trigger treating.
So Helen before we begin, what do you know about
sins and sin eating? Since I've had my fair share,
(00:46):
I'm sure, But sin eating I actually, weirdly enough, have
heard of this job before because a very creative friend
of mine named Paul Kloss did a short film years
ago with like marionette puppets. It was very cool short
film and the film the name of the film was
(01:06):
in the House of the sin Eater. And before this
short film, I had never heard of this profession. I
didn't know anything about it. But I watched this film
and using marionettes, I discovered that there was a job
that when someone died, you would put a loaf of
bread on the body and the bread magically absorbed this
(01:29):
dead person sins, and then someone would eat that bread
and take on that person sins, And I was like, what,
this is such an archaic, all feudalistic, medieval times situation.
It's I'm fascinated by it, definitely. Yeah, I have a
Catholic upbringing. I have lots of family that are die
(01:51):
hard Catholics, and of course I'm very familiar with sins
and the concept of hell and purgatory or your souls
go to purgatory and hope to get to heaven after
you die. Yeah, that I guess this isn't too far
fetched for me, like, knowing what I know about Roman Catholicism. However,
(02:12):
I had never heard of sin eating before researching for
this episode, and I too, am fascinated by this. If
you think about it, it related into you take the
body of Christ when you take communion, right, like you
eat a piece of bread essentially that is supposed to
help absolve you of sin. So it's an extension of that, right,
(02:32):
only it's like turbo charging it. It's I'm gonna take
all my sins and you know, after I'm dead, I'm
gonna shove it into this huge loaf of bread and
you eat it. And Catholics do believe that bread is
literally Christ and so this isn't too far fetched when
you really think about it. And we're not talking about
just Catholics here, we're talking about many Protestants. Apparently this
(02:55):
profession had pagan roots, so we'll get into that later. Okay,
are you guys ready. If so, let's hop in the
job Slete time machine back to the seventeen hundreds. Boo
boo boo. I'm sorry if you guys think it's corny,
(03:16):
but me and Matt this is like the highlight of
our week is doing the sound effects for the time machine.
So we're going back to the seventeen hundreds, the heyday
of sin eating. Let's look at the qualifications of sin eating. Well,
there really weren't that many. Pretty much anybody who wanted
to do it could do it. It didn't pay well.
(03:39):
Most senators were kind of loaners. Some of them were beggars, alcoholics.
I would say that you had to be either brave
or foolish maybe, or maybe someone who just didn't care
about you're sol being heavy with sins. That makes a
(03:59):
lot of sense because it's taking on someone else's sins.
You're either going to be completely sinless, which the church
has taught us. Nobody is sinless, So then you must
be desperate for money, for food, even the food that
they would give you that had the sins in it.
You're like, hey, man, i'm starving. It's if it's bread,
even if it's chuck full of sin, I'm eating it. Well,
(04:22):
we've got Natalie Zarelli as our guest to fill us
in with more about these qualifications. Natalie stumbled across this
rare occupation and was so intrigued by it that she
did some research about sin eating and wrote a fantastic
article about it for Atlas Obscura. So it's really difficult
(04:43):
from physical evidence and from historical records. Two with certainty
put a lot of this together. They were perhaps extremely
poor um a lot of the time. It's hard to
say exactly how they became sin eaters, but they were
people who, at least at the time of sin eating,
(05:05):
they were not considered socially acceptable. So there was sort
of a place for them to be part of society
in that sense, and it was a benefit in a
small way for them to say, get fed for the
day for one of the maybe many funerals that happened
in that day or week, um, And so they we're
(05:29):
fulfilling these sort of roles that were probably passively assigned.
They weren't necessarily um part of some grand design where
somebody had a you know, there wasn't like a town
mayor that said, okay, we're we need to make sure
we have a sin eater. Um. But more that it's
probably fulfilled. You know, we need somebody is willing to
(05:50):
do it and another person needs it. There are a
lot of the descriptions and accounts that exist, say in
an olden psychle Pedia describing the practice in the eight hundreds,
for example, they refer to the sin eater as him.
But I'm not sure that it's really recorded whether there
(06:13):
were co eds and eaters. It seems like it might
have been a male profession. But it's hard to say, Wow,
that's so interesting. So if you're desperate for money, a beggar,
you could actually eat by going from funeral to funeral
and just being like, hey, you got any sins for
me to eat? Yeah, desperate does seem to be the
word that stands out, and it's sad. And there's a
(06:35):
lot of conjecture here too. You can already tell Natalie
talking about this that she's very careful because there's a
lot we don't know about this occupation. We have very
little evidence. So just the listener, you listening right now,
shouldn't know that. We don't have like tons of information
on this. One of the things that stands out to
me with this job is that they are literally becoming
(06:58):
more evil as they're performing their task. Now, this is
the belief. Of course, I'm not saying that all of
this is true or not, but they believe that as
eating the sins, So this person is like becoming more
evil right before our eyes. This clearly is like a
European Catholic doesn't sound like kind of medieval European Catholicism situation.
(07:25):
I would be surprised if there were sin eaters in
the Buddhist tradition. Yeah, or like Taoism. There's no sin
eating in Taoism. This is clearly like Christian slash Catholic
in Europe because back then they were trying all kinds
of things to to try to get out of sins.
Right Like, there's a lot of stuff to try to
get into God's good good graces. Definitely we'll get in more.
(07:50):
We'll get more into the context later on in the show,
but I will say that it did have pagan roots
as well. So what kind of skills did you need
to have Matt to become a sin either. The first
thing I thought of was no fear of God, But
Natalie has a bit better information here. Was not considered
a good job. I mean, it might have been considered
(08:11):
a necessary job, interestingly, but it was not not considered
a job that you would want to aspired to. In
the United Kingdom at least have they tended not to
have a lot of prestige associated with them. They were necessary,
but they were sort of theoretically below a lot of
(08:37):
um other people in the society, even among the same
sort of wage earners in their peer group in that sense.
So they a lot of the customs that arise around that,
you know, a lot of the customs that arise around
the dead and trying to put you know, the souls
(09:01):
of loved ones to rest. Unless it was a member
of the clergy, it was really seen as a profession
that you didn't want to have yourself, but you absolutely
needed to have. And one thing that one an information
bit that I came across is that a lot of
the time, it looks like maybe sin eaters were brought
(09:22):
in for people who died very suddenly, so they didn't
have their last right threat to them by a priest,
and they didn't get that sort of closure or that
last sort of making right with God so that they
could confess. And even among non Catholics, the sin eaters
sometimes may have taken some kind of confession from people
(09:44):
at the funeral um, so they may have also played
a role in that sense. But so as however necessary
they were though it was seeing this kind of dirty work.
I think that's a long way of just saying that
they anybody off the streets that would be willing to
do it. Yeah, you didn't really need a specific skill
(10:06):
set except for the willingness to be able to take
on this job, because yeah, because nobody really wanted to
do it. The average person, like if they weren't desperate
for money or food, wouldn't do this job. They were like,
I'm eating someone else's since I got my own sins
to deal with here. So you had to be really
like on the bottom rung of society to be like, yeah,
(10:28):
I've got nothing to lose at this point, except starving
to death. So yeah, I'll do I'll take on somebody
else's sins. So you would think that maybe they would
(10:50):
be treated with higher prestige or get paid more. No,
I feel like that. Back then, especially in Europe, there
were a lot of these types of jobs that were
necessary quote unquote evils, like jobs that needed to get done,
but nobody really wanted the jobs, and and those jobs
did not have any social clout, like these were jobs
(11:11):
that anyone aspired to do, but they were necessary jobs. Okay,
tools of the trade. What did the average sine eater
need to do this job? As you mentioned earlier, you
need bread to soak up those sins, but you could
also use wine or beer to be placed next to it,
because you've gotta wash the bread down, right of course,
sinny bread, cinny bread needs a little lubrication going down,
(11:34):
come on, and that wine and beer could soak up
those sins just as well as the bread could. It
doesn't seem like there's that much information on sort of
specific tools, but they're very well. May have been a
bowl involved. It may or may not have been the
family of the deceased that provided this bowl. Same thing
(11:54):
with the stool for kneeling at the corpse. There may
have been a stool that family has kind of had,
maybe for this purpose. Maybe it was just a multipurpose stool.
It wouldn't be impossible for the person who was sent
eating to have these objects with them, But it also
seems like the person who eat the sins did not
(12:17):
really own much of anything of their own, so it's
hard to say it could have been. I feel like
the most that they might be able to have with
them would be maybe a bowl or maybe something to
drink the ale out of. And this is the time
when you know, even small everyday objects like combs and
(12:38):
and articles of clothing were much more expensive relatively than
they are today. Right, So people who are eating the
sins of others probably own very little, And that's part
of the appeal in a way. If you are this destitute, maybe,
if you're already of social prey and you can't earn
your keep anywhere, you may not need any thing at
(13:00):
all to start your career in sin eating. You know,
you just need yourself and your own mortal soul. Just
come on, just bring your mortal salt. That's all that's
all you need. Yeah, You don't need a sin eating
kit or anything have a suitcase walking around. You don't
need a sit eating backpack or anything like. You just
bring your mortal soul. That's it, Okay, So now we're
(13:23):
gonna look at a typical day for the sin eater.
The sin eater would be hired essentially by the family.
They would walk up to the door of the family
of the deceased and they would open the door, and
some accounts say that the family would put a grout
(13:43):
which was about I believe fourpence into the pockett of
the sin eater, or hand it to the sin eater.
They would throw it in their pocket, and the sin
eater would walk in and be handed a piece of
bread a cup of ale, and there would also be
some bread on the corpse of the recently deceased. The
(14:06):
family would then bring often a really short stool that
would be sat right in front of the the corpse,
and the sin eater would sit or kneel at the
stool and sort of hover over the body. And there
would even be sometimes a saying or a prayer said,
(14:31):
and then he would eat the sins. And at least
one account of this prayer would be that the senator
would announce that in part they would pawn part of
their soul for the sins of the recently deceased, and
they would eat the bread. They would sort of be
(14:53):
there while other people in the room probably also paid
attention and ate their own bread and ate, you know,
any drink, any refreshments at this at this week. Essentially
the senator would get up and be finished, and some
accounts have the sin eater, you know, they would just leave,
And the account doesn't really tell you much about what
(15:14):
that looks like. But in some or at least one
account that I found describing this, the family would then
actually yell at the senator and derive the sin eater out,
throwing things at the senator, just telling them to scram
So sometimes it sounds like they invite this person in,
(15:35):
they absorb this very dangerous sin from their loved one,
and then they're kind of driven away and they don't
stay for the rest of the ceremony and they have
to leave, and presumably they go home. Oh man, that
sounds so mean. Please come and eat our loved ones sins,
(15:55):
and now we're going to throw things that you will
yell at you get the hell out because the senator
has all these sins now, like, oh man, we don't
want you around. It seems like such a bait and switch.
It feels like a bait and switch. Hey, please come
in and eat our loved one sits. Oh now you're
sin full, gross, get out of my house. At least
the senator got paid up front. That is true. That
(16:16):
is true. I was thinking while she was describing it
that actually one of the skills you have to have
is a strong enough stomach to be able to eat,
like basically hovering over a dead body. Yeah, I didn't
think about that. I wouldn't feel particularly, oh I need
a snack right now if I'm like in direct proximity
(16:38):
of a dead body, wouldn't he got a smell. This
is before embalming, like came a couple hundred years later,
really with more advanced embalming. So the other thing that
stands out here is she mentioned that Natalie mentioned that
they were paid four English pence at one ceremony. I
(17:01):
found another documented case of them getting paid sixpence sixpence.
None the richer obscure reference there, But yeah, that's the
equivalent of two or three dollars in today's money is
what they got paid for two or three American dollars
for those of you not in the United States. So
again it shows you how desperate they were like and
(17:24):
both sides were desperate. It was a win win. It
was a slim win win. It was not a big win.
It was a small win, I would say, for both sides.
But also I totally take it back at the beginning
in the intro when I said, oh, this is an
easy job, This was not an easy job. If you
had to eat bread over a decomposing corpse for two bucks, yeah,
(17:48):
I would imagine that many beggars would just continue just begging.
They probably get more money more easily that way. Okay,
So Matt, earlier we were saying that this was Protestant
(18:10):
and Catholic tradition, but you also mentioned that maybe there
was like a pagan tradition involved as well. Yeah, I
found there were accounts of some Pagans doing this hundreds
of years before Christians were doing this, and well, Christians
notoriously have stolen many pagan traditions, so that's no surprise.
(18:30):
But also I ran across nobles who used to give
food to the poor before a funeral in exchange for
prayers on behalf of their recently deceased loved ones. In
addition to Pagan tradition, this was also in Jewish tradition.
Oh yeah, Like in the Old Testament, they would sacrifice
(18:53):
a goat, right, burn a goat as an offering in essence,
the goat was the one that ate your sins, and
then they would sacrifice the goat. There were actually two goats. Yeah,
one of them would be sacrificed and one would not.
They would actually let that other goat escape into the wilderness,
and that goat had the sins of the deceased with it,
(19:15):
so they're like, okay, get out of here, or at
the sins of the deceased. We don't want to see
you again. And so apparently the term scapegoat that's how
that originated. Oh no way, it's literally the escaped goat. Yes, sins.
I learned something new today. I learned something from you.
Oh that's interesting. Are you familiar with indulgences? I don't.
(19:39):
I am not familiar with indulgences. Is this a Catholic thing?
It is? Yeah, so do you may have heard of
Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Yeah, so that was
a big complaints that he had. One of his ninety
five complaints of the Catholic Church was that some of
this indulgence money was going to things that were just
(19:59):
like in riching the church, not helping the poor. We've
talked about this a little bit in past episodes, but
like the Catholic Church kind of was notorious back in
the day. Hey give us a little money and it's
easier for you to get into heaven. Or hey give
us one of your children to work to be an
altar boy and it'll ease your way into heaven. There
(20:20):
were a lot of like weird shortcuts to get into
heaven according to the Catholic Church. Oh yeah, and there's
a lot of emphasis on souls. Have you seen the
movie Coco the Pixar one of my all time favorite films,
But yeah, that you actually learn a lot about All
Souls Day in that film, which is a very important
(20:40):
Catholic holiday. And actually in some traditions there there have
been Catholics who have piled heaps of cakes on top
of caskets or gravestones to honor the dead. And these cakes, again,
like maybe you can soak up the sins? Who do
you do that? But the thing is what's weird is
(21:02):
like the Catholic Church and they talked trash about sin eaters.
They never officially sanctioned any sin eating. They thought it
was blasphemy, really was sacrilegious. Yeah, oh that's interesting. So
this was like a rogue practiced by the general populace. Yeah.
And and actually it was more common with Protestants for
(21:25):
that reason because the Catholic Church was like, no, we
don't do that, we have priests. Okay, very interesting. All
Soul's Day is November two, November one is All Saints Day,
and Halloween is October one. So those three days all
have this tradition of cakes. These cakes I've mentioned, and
(21:46):
actually the origin of tricker treating where kids go around
asking for candy, It started out with them going around
asking for cakes so they could eat these cakes, so
they could eat these sins. What oh man. So when
I buy a twenty pound bag of Snickers to allegedly
(22:08):
give away on October one, that allegedly it all ties.
And then on November two, I'm like surrounded by fifty
rappers of Snickers bars on my couch. That is all
related to sin eating. Whoa everything comes full circle. So
one of the last recorded sin eaters was a man
(22:32):
named Richard Munslow and he was born in eighteen thirty two.
He died in nineteen o six. And when he was
performing sin eating, he took this on on his own
as a way to process his own grief because three
of his children passed away and he couldn't um express
(22:56):
or handle his grief in any other way except to
try to go from funeral to funeral participating in the
grief of others. And so this was, you know, an
example of it was a man performing sin eating. At
the time, it was apparently very uncommon, if not, you know,
(23:18):
almost extinct by the time he started doing this himself.
But he clearly knew it existed, uh, and he he
knew how to sort of approach people, and people did
use his services. So one of the very real life,
you know, actual names that we have for somebody that
(23:41):
was a sin eater is this Richard Munslow. And he
was a man. So basically we only have examples, solid
examples of men that I've seen so far sin eating. Interesting.
That's interesting because I was going to say late eight Dreds.
That seems quite late. But it seems like this guy
was rogue, like he took it upon himself. He wasn't
(24:04):
like this was a thing that was rampant in the
eighteen hundreds. This is a you know, one single man
who was processing his family tragedy in this way when
he reached out to other people who had family tragedy
and they were all were like, sure, yeah, you can
come over and grieve with us and eat this bread
if you want. So that's good. That was an outlet
for him to express his grief. But also it seems
(24:26):
like maybe the profession had died out long before he
was into it. This may be a good opportunity to
look at why there are no mor Son eaters today.
No one ever says, you know, why they don't have
it anymore. They talk about it with wonder about you know,
when people did this. They don't think there's a single reason.
(24:48):
It could be that people started regarding the role of
the clergy of you know, their church of choice as
the ones that take care of all of that, and
that you know, they're sort of social role in death
sort of grew to encompass all aspects of it and
(25:08):
sne eating wasn't as necessary. It could be that people
stopped wanting to sacrifice their own soul for others. But
it also could be that the view that another person
could could take on your own sins that may have
sort of dwindled, especially as different forms of Protestantism sort
(25:29):
of became more and more known and popular. Like I
said earlier, this was certainly not something that churches told
people to do. It's not something that was condoned. It
was not something that was part of the Bible. And
so especially when you get into Protestant religions where people
are reading the Bible more, you're not going to use
(25:53):
these practices that aren't condoned. I think around this time
there was probably the development of a more kinder, gentler
form of Protestant Protestantism. Whereas like back in the day,
during those early times, especially the medieval times, like it
was like people were afraid for their mortal soul. Like
(26:16):
people were like, I am going to go to Hell
and there's fire there and brimstone, and it's gonna be horrible,
and they were doing all kinds of weird things to
try to get out of that. Whereas I think the
the evolution of Protestantism especially is it's not as black
and white are cut and dry, and it's not as
(26:37):
you're doomed to this forever hell, like you know, the
idea of like fire and brimstone. It just kind of
like wasn't as I think it started with the second
grade Awakening, which was the late seventeen hundreds and early
eighteen hundreds, which was you see all these brand new
Protestant denominations that spring up, and like you were saying,
(26:57):
a lot of them were more like, oh jeez, this
is your friend, no focusing more on the New Testament stuff,
And why is it some random dude off the street
that you're getting in here to take care of the
sin issues? So both of those things I think, yeah,
we're contributed to the decline of this profession. Hey, listeners,
tell us on Twitter, if you had to eat sins,
(27:19):
what food would co best in holding your sins? If
you would pick up bread, would it be a rye
bread for your sins? Or would you go with a
lobster roll full of sins or deviled eggs? Am? I right? Big?
Thank you to listener Wendy Goldberg, who actually suggested this
topic If any listeners out there have an idea on
(27:42):
future Jobsolete episodes, tweet us at job Slete pod job
Slete is produced for I Heart Radio by Zealots Manufacturing
hand Forge Podcast for You. It's hosted by us Helen
Hong That's Me and Matt That's Me. The show was
conceived even produced by Steve Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and
(28:04):
Jason Elliott. Our editor is Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is
Amelia Pauca, production coordinator is Angie Hymes, and theme music
is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. A special thanks to
our I Heart Radio team, Katrina Norvelle, Nikky Etre, Ali Cantor,
Carrie Lieberman, Will Pearson, connal Burne and Bob Pittman.
This is job Selete, where we talk about jobs that
are no longer jobs. This week we're learning about an
old job that may seem surprisingly easy. You might be
risking your soul, but still you get money for eating
people's sins. Today we're looking at sin eaters. Coming up
(00:24):
why we call it scapegoating, marionettes, tarnished souls, sinful bread souls,
finally a job MAT's never heard of, and trigger treating.
So Helen before we begin, what do you know about
sins and sin eating? Since I've had my fair share,
(00:46):
I'm sure, But sin eating I actually, weirdly enough, have
heard of this job before because a very creative friend
of mine named Paul Kloss did a short film years
ago with like marionette puppets. It was very cool short
film and the film the name of the film was
(01:06):
in the House of the sin Eater. And before this
short film, I had never heard of this profession. I
didn't know anything about it. But I watched this film
and using marionettes, I discovered that there was a job
that when someone died, you would put a loaf of
bread on the body and the bread magically absorbed this
(01:29):
dead person sins, and then someone would eat that bread
and take on that person sins, And I was like, what,
this is such an archaic, all feudalistic, medieval times situation.
It's I'm fascinated by it, definitely. Yeah, I have a
Catholic upbringing. I have lots of family that are die
(01:51):
hard Catholics, and of course I'm very familiar with sins
and the concept of hell and purgatory or your souls
go to purgatory and hope to get to heaven after
you die. Yeah, that I guess this isn't too far
fetched for me, like, knowing what I know about Roman Catholicism. However,
(02:12):
I had never heard of sin eating before researching for
this episode, and I too, am fascinated by this. If
you think about it, it related into you take the
body of Christ when you take communion, right, like you
eat a piece of bread essentially that is supposed to
help absolve you of sin. So it's an extension of that, right,
(02:32):
only it's like turbo charging it. It's I'm gonna take
all my sins and you know, after I'm dead, I'm
gonna shove it into this huge loaf of bread and
you eat it. And Catholics do believe that bread is
literally Christ and so this isn't too far fetched when
you really think about it. And we're not talking about
just Catholics here, we're talking about many Protestants. Apparently this
(02:55):
profession had pagan roots, so we'll get into that later. Okay,
are you guys ready. If so, let's hop in the
job Slete time machine back to the seventeen hundreds. Boo
boo boo. I'm sorry if you guys think it's corny,
(03:16):
but me and Matt this is like the highlight of
our week is doing the sound effects for the time machine.
So we're going back to the seventeen hundreds, the heyday
of sin eating. Let's look at the qualifications of sin eating. Well,
there really weren't that many. Pretty much anybody who wanted
to do it could do it. It didn't pay well.
(03:39):
Most senators were kind of loaners. Some of them were beggars, alcoholics.
I would say that you had to be either brave
or foolish maybe, or maybe someone who just didn't care
about you're sol being heavy with sins. That makes a
(03:59):
lot of sense because it's taking on someone else's sins.
You're either going to be completely sinless, which the church
has taught us. Nobody is sinless, So then you must
be desperate for money, for food, even the food that
they would give you that had the sins in it.
You're like, hey, man, i'm starving. It's if it's bread,
even if it's chuck full of sin, I'm eating it. Well,
(04:22):
we've got Natalie Zarelli as our guest to fill us
in with more about these qualifications. Natalie stumbled across this
rare occupation and was so intrigued by it that she
did some research about sin eating and wrote a fantastic
article about it for Atlas Obscura. So it's really difficult
(04:43):
from physical evidence and from historical records. Two with certainty
put a lot of this together. They were perhaps extremely
poor um a lot of the time. It's hard to
say exactly how they became sin eaters, but they were
people who, at least at the time of sin eating,
(05:05):
they were not considered socially acceptable. So there was sort
of a place for them to be part of society
in that sense, and it was a benefit in a
small way for them to say, get fed for the
day for one of the maybe many funerals that happened
in that day or week, um, And so they we're
(05:29):
fulfilling these sort of roles that were probably passively assigned.
They weren't necessarily um part of some grand design where
somebody had a you know, there wasn't like a town
mayor that said, okay, we're we need to make sure
we have a sin eater. Um. But more that it's
probably fulfilled. You know, we need somebody is willing to
(05:50):
do it and another person needs it. There are a
lot of the descriptions and accounts that exist, say in
an olden psychle Pedia describing the practice in the eight hundreds,
for example, they refer to the sin eater as him.
But I'm not sure that it's really recorded whether there
(06:13):
were co eds and eaters. It seems like it might
have been a male profession. But it's hard to say, Wow,
that's so interesting. So if you're desperate for money, a beggar,
you could actually eat by going from funeral to funeral
and just being like, hey, you got any sins for
me to eat? Yeah, desperate does seem to be the
word that stands out, and it's sad. And there's a
(06:35):
lot of conjecture here too. You can already tell Natalie
talking about this that she's very careful because there's a
lot we don't know about this occupation. We have very
little evidence. So just the listener, you listening right now,
shouldn't know that. We don't have like tons of information
on this. One of the things that stands out to
me with this job is that they are literally becoming
(06:58):
more evil as they're performing their task. Now, this is
the belief. Of course, I'm not saying that all of
this is true or not, but they believe that as
eating the sins, So this person is like becoming more
evil right before our eyes. This clearly is like a
European Catholic doesn't sound like kind of medieval European Catholicism situation.
(07:25):
I would be surprised if there were sin eaters in
the Buddhist tradition. Yeah, or like Taoism. There's no sin
eating in Taoism. This is clearly like Christian slash Catholic
in Europe because back then they were trying all kinds
of things to to try to get out of sins.
Right Like, there's a lot of stuff to try to
get into God's good good graces. Definitely we'll get in more.
(07:50):
We'll get more into the context later on in the show,
but I will say that it did have pagan roots
as well. So what kind of skills did you need
to have Matt to become a sin either. The first
thing I thought of was no fear of God, But
Natalie has a bit better information here. Was not considered
a good job. I mean, it might have been considered
(08:11):
a necessary job, interestingly, but it was not not considered
a job that you would want to aspired to. In
the United Kingdom at least have they tended not to
have a lot of prestige associated with them. They were necessary,
but they were sort of theoretically below a lot of
(08:37):
um other people in the society, even among the same
sort of wage earners in their peer group in that sense.
So they a lot of the customs that arise around that,
you know, a lot of the customs that arise around
the dead and trying to put you know, the souls
(09:01):
of loved ones to rest. Unless it was a member
of the clergy, it was really seen as a profession
that you didn't want to have yourself, but you absolutely
needed to have. And one thing that one an information
bit that I came across is that a lot of
the time, it looks like maybe sin eaters were brought
(09:22):
in for people who died very suddenly, so they didn't
have their last right threat to them by a priest,
and they didn't get that sort of closure or that
last sort of making right with God so that they
could confess. And even among non Catholics, the sin eaters
sometimes may have taken some kind of confession from people
(09:44):
at the funeral um, so they may have also played
a role in that sense. But so as however necessary
they were though it was seeing this kind of dirty work.
I think that's a long way of just saying that
they anybody off the streets that would be willing to
do it. Yeah, you didn't really need a specific skill
(10:06):
set except for the willingness to be able to take
on this job, because yeah, because nobody really wanted to
do it. The average person, like if they weren't desperate
for money or food, wouldn't do this job. They were like,
I'm eating someone else's since I got my own sins
to deal with here. So you had to be really
like on the bottom rung of society to be like, yeah,
(10:28):
I've got nothing to lose at this point, except starving
to death. So yeah, I'll do I'll take on somebody
else's sins. So you would think that maybe they would
(10:50):
be treated with higher prestige or get paid more. No,
I feel like that. Back then, especially in Europe, there
were a lot of these types of jobs that were
necessary quote unquote evils, like jobs that needed to get done,
but nobody really wanted the jobs, and and those jobs
did not have any social clout, like these were jobs
(11:11):
that anyone aspired to do, but they were necessary jobs. Okay,
tools of the trade. What did the average sine eater
need to do this job? As you mentioned earlier, you
need bread to soak up those sins, but you could
also use wine or beer to be placed next to it,
because you've gotta wash the bread down, right of course,
sinny bread, cinny bread needs a little lubrication going down,
(11:34):
come on, and that wine and beer could soak up
those sins just as well as the bread could. It
doesn't seem like there's that much information on sort of
specific tools, but they're very well. May have been a
bowl involved. It may or may not have been the
family of the deceased that provided this bowl. Same thing
(11:54):
with the stool for kneeling at the corpse. There may
have been a stool that family has kind of had,
maybe for this purpose. Maybe it was just a multipurpose stool.
It wouldn't be impossible for the person who was sent
eating to have these objects with them, But it also
seems like the person who eat the sins did not
(12:17):
really own much of anything of their own, so it's
hard to say it could have been. I feel like
the most that they might be able to have with
them would be maybe a bowl or maybe something to
drink the ale out of. And this is the time
when you know, even small everyday objects like combs and
(12:38):
and articles of clothing were much more expensive relatively than
they are today. Right, So people who are eating the
sins of others probably own very little, And that's part
of the appeal in a way. If you are this destitute, maybe,
if you're already of social prey and you can't earn
your keep anywhere, you may not need any thing at
(13:00):
all to start your career in sin eating. You know,
you just need yourself and your own mortal soul. Just
come on, just bring your mortal salt. That's all that's
all you need. Yeah, You don't need a sin eating
kit or anything have a suitcase walking around. You don't
need a sit eating backpack or anything like. You just
bring your mortal soul. That's it, Okay, So now we're
(13:23):
gonna look at a typical day for the sin eater.
The sin eater would be hired essentially by the family.
They would walk up to the door of the family
of the deceased and they would open the door, and
some accounts say that the family would put a grout
(13:43):
which was about I believe fourpence into the pockett of
the sin eater, or hand it to the sin eater.
They would throw it in their pocket, and the sin
eater would walk in and be handed a piece of
bread a cup of ale, and there would also be
some bread on the corpse of the recently deceased. The
(14:06):
family would then bring often a really short stool that
would be sat right in front of the the corpse,
and the sin eater would sit or kneel at the
stool and sort of hover over the body. And there
would even be sometimes a saying or a prayer said,
(14:31):
and then he would eat the sins. And at least
one account of this prayer would be that the senator
would announce that in part they would pawn part of
their soul for the sins of the recently deceased, and
they would eat the bread. They would sort of be
(14:53):
there while other people in the room probably also paid
attention and ate their own bread and ate, you know,
any drink, any refreshments at this at this week. Essentially
the senator would get up and be finished, and some
accounts have the sin eater, you know, they would just leave,
And the account doesn't really tell you much about what
(15:14):
that looks like. But in some or at least one
account that I found describing this, the family would then
actually yell at the senator and derive the sin eater out,
throwing things at the senator, just telling them to scram
So sometimes it sounds like they invite this person in,
(15:35):
they absorb this very dangerous sin from their loved one,
and then they're kind of driven away and they don't
stay for the rest of the ceremony and they have
to leave, and presumably they go home. Oh man, that
sounds so mean. Please come and eat our loved ones sins,
(15:55):
and now we're going to throw things that you will
yell at you get the hell out because the senator
has all these sins now, like, oh man, we don't
want you around. It seems like such a bait and switch.
It feels like a bait and switch. Hey, please come
in and eat our loved one sits. Oh now you're
sin full, gross, get out of my house. At least
the senator got paid up front. That is true. That
(16:16):
is true. I was thinking while she was describing it
that actually one of the skills you have to have
is a strong enough stomach to be able to eat,
like basically hovering over a dead body. Yeah, I didn't
think about that. I wouldn't feel particularly, oh I need
a snack right now if I'm like in direct proximity
(16:38):
of a dead body, wouldn't he got a smell. This
is before embalming, like came a couple hundred years later,
really with more advanced embalming. So the other thing that
stands out here is she mentioned that Natalie mentioned that
they were paid four English pence at one ceremony. I
(17:01):
found another documented case of them getting paid sixpence sixpence.
None the richer obscure reference there, But yeah, that's the
equivalent of two or three dollars in today's money is
what they got paid for two or three American dollars
for those of you not in the United States. So
again it shows you how desperate they were like and
(17:24):
both sides were desperate. It was a win win. It
was a slim win win. It was not a big win.
It was a small win, I would say, for both sides.
But also I totally take it back at the beginning
in the intro when I said, oh, this is an
easy job, This was not an easy job. If you
had to eat bread over a decomposing corpse for two bucks, yeah,
(17:48):
I would imagine that many beggars would just continue just begging.
They probably get more money more easily that way. Okay,
So Matt, earlier we were saying that this was Protestant
(18:10):
and Catholic tradition, but you also mentioned that maybe there
was like a pagan tradition involved as well. Yeah, I
found there were accounts of some Pagans doing this hundreds
of years before Christians were doing this, and well, Christians
notoriously have stolen many pagan traditions, so that's no surprise.
(18:30):
But also I ran across nobles who used to give
food to the poor before a funeral in exchange for
prayers on behalf of their recently deceased loved ones. In
addition to Pagan tradition, this was also in Jewish tradition.
Oh yeah, Like in the Old Testament, they would sacrifice
(18:53):
a goat, right, burn a goat as an offering in essence,
the goat was the one that ate your sins, and
then they would sacrifice the goat. There were actually two goats. Yeah,
one of them would be sacrificed and one would not.
They would actually let that other goat escape into the wilderness,
and that goat had the sins of the deceased with it,
(19:15):
so they're like, okay, get out of here, or at
the sins of the deceased. We don't want to see
you again. And so apparently the term scapegoat that's how
that originated. Oh no way, it's literally the escaped goat. Yes, sins.
I learned something new today. I learned something from you.
Oh that's interesting. Are you familiar with indulgences? I don't.
(19:39):
I am not familiar with indulgences. Is this a Catholic thing?
It is? Yeah, so do you may have heard of
Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Yeah, so that was
a big complaints that he had. One of his ninety
five complaints of the Catholic Church was that some of
this indulgence money was going to things that were just
(19:59):
like in riching the church, not helping the poor. We've
talked about this a little bit in past episodes, but
like the Catholic Church kind of was notorious back in
the day. Hey give us a little money and it's
easier for you to get into heaven. Or hey give
us one of your children to work to be an
altar boy and it'll ease your way into heaven. There
(20:20):
were a lot of like weird shortcuts to get into
heaven according to the Catholic Church. Oh yeah, and there's
a lot of emphasis on souls. Have you seen the
movie Coco the Pixar one of my all time favorite films,
But yeah, that you actually learn a lot about All
Souls Day in that film, which is a very important
(20:40):
Catholic holiday. And actually in some traditions there there have
been Catholics who have piled heaps of cakes on top
of caskets or gravestones to honor the dead. And these cakes, again,
like maybe you can soak up the sins? Who do
you do that? But the thing is what's weird is
(21:02):
like the Catholic Church and they talked trash about sin eaters.
They never officially sanctioned any sin eating. They thought it
was blasphemy, really was sacrilegious. Yeah, oh that's interesting. So
this was like a rogue practiced by the general populace. Yeah.
And and actually it was more common with Protestants for
(21:25):
that reason because the Catholic Church was like, no, we
don't do that, we have priests. Okay, very interesting. All
Soul's Day is November two, November one is All Saints Day,
and Halloween is October one. So those three days all
have this tradition of cakes. These cakes I've mentioned, and
(21:46):
actually the origin of tricker treating where kids go around
asking for candy, It started out with them going around
asking for cakes so they could eat these cakes, so
they could eat these sins. What oh man. So when
I buy a twenty pound bag of Snickers to allegedly
(22:08):
give away on October one, that allegedly it all ties.
And then on November two, I'm like surrounded by fifty
rappers of Snickers bars on my couch. That is all
related to sin eating. Whoa everything comes full circle. So
one of the last recorded sin eaters was a man
(22:32):
named Richard Munslow and he was born in eighteen thirty two.
He died in nineteen o six. And when he was
performing sin eating, he took this on on his own
as a way to process his own grief because three
of his children passed away and he couldn't um express
(22:56):
or handle his grief in any other way except to
try to go from funeral to funeral participating in the
grief of others. And so this was, you know, an
example of it was a man performing sin eating. At
the time, it was apparently very uncommon, if not, you know,
(23:18):
almost extinct by the time he started doing this himself.
But he clearly knew it existed, uh, and he he
knew how to sort of approach people, and people did
use his services. So one of the very real life,
you know, actual names that we have for somebody that
(23:41):
was a sin eater is this Richard Munslow. And he
was a man. So basically we only have examples, solid
examples of men that I've seen so far sin eating. Interesting.
That's interesting because I was going to say late eight Dreds.
That seems quite late. But it seems like this guy
was rogue, like he took it upon himself. He wasn't
(24:04):
like this was a thing that was rampant in the
eighteen hundreds. This is a you know, one single man
who was processing his family tragedy in this way when
he reached out to other people who had family tragedy
and they were all were like, sure, yeah, you can
come over and grieve with us and eat this bread
if you want. So that's good. That was an outlet
for him to express his grief. But also it seems
(24:26):
like maybe the profession had died out long before he
was into it. This may be a good opportunity to
look at why there are no mor Son eaters today.
No one ever says, you know, why they don't have
it anymore. They talk about it with wonder about you know,
when people did this. They don't think there's a single reason.
(24:48):
It could be that people started regarding the role of
the clergy of you know, their church of choice as
the ones that take care of all of that, and
that you know, they're sort of social role in death
sort of grew to encompass all aspects of it and
(25:08):
sne eating wasn't as necessary. It could be that people
stopped wanting to sacrifice their own soul for others. But
it also could be that the view that another person
could could take on your own sins that may have
sort of dwindled, especially as different forms of Protestantism sort
(25:29):
of became more and more known and popular. Like I
said earlier, this was certainly not something that churches told
people to do. It's not something that was condoned. It
was not something that was part of the Bible. And
so especially when you get into Protestant religions where people
are reading the Bible more, you're not going to use
(25:53):
these practices that aren't condoned. I think around this time
there was probably the development of a more kinder, gentler
form of Protestant Protestantism. Whereas like back in the day,
during those early times, especially the medieval times, like it
was like people were afraid for their mortal soul. Like
(26:16):
people were like, I am going to go to Hell
and there's fire there and brimstone, and it's gonna be horrible,
and they were doing all kinds of weird things to
try to get out of that. Whereas I think the
the evolution of Protestantism especially is it's not as black
and white are cut and dry, and it's not as
(26:37):
you're doomed to this forever hell, like you know, the
idea of like fire and brimstone. It just kind of
like wasn't as I think it started with the second
grade Awakening, which was the late seventeen hundreds and early
eighteen hundreds, which was you see all these brand new
Protestant denominations that spring up, and like you were saying,
(26:57):
a lot of them were more like, oh jeez, this
is your friend, no focusing more on the New Testament stuff,
And why is it some random dude off the street
that you're getting in here to take care of the
sin issues? So both of those things I think, yeah,
we're contributed to the decline of this profession. Hey, listeners,
tell us on Twitter, if you had to eat sins,
(27:19):
what food would co best in holding your sins? If
you would pick up bread, would it be a rye
bread for your sins? Or would you go with a
lobster roll full of sins or deviled eggs? Am? I right? Big?
Thank you to listener Wendy Goldberg, who actually suggested this
topic If any listeners out there have an idea on
(27:42):
future Jobsolete episodes, tweet us at job Slete pod job
Slete is produced for I Heart Radio by Zealots Manufacturing
hand Forge Podcast for You. It's hosted by us Helen
Hong That's Me and Matt That's Me. The show was
conceived even produced by Steve Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and
(28:04):
Jason Elliott. Our editor is Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is
Amelia Pauca, production coordinator is Angie Hymes, and theme music
is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. A special thanks to
our I Heart Radio team, Katrina Norvelle, Nikky Etre, Ali Cantor,
Carrie Lieberman, Will Pearson, connal Burne and Bob Pittman.
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