We all want a peaceful transition into the afterlife. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries across rural Britain and Wales, people relied on a much darker ritual to save their souls.
They sent for the Sin Eater.
The Sin Eater was a social pariah, a person so poor and desperate that they agreed to live as a ghost among the living. When a person was on their deathbed, a piece of bread and a wooden bowl of ale were placed directly onto the chest of the dying or newly deceased.
As the food sat on the corpse, it was believed to physically absorb all the unconfessed sins and crimes the person had committed in life.
The Sin Eater would then sit in the dark room, consume the bread, and drink the ale. Through this act, they legally and spiritually inherited the total damnation of the dead person, freeing the deceased's soul to enter heaven.
For this, they were paid just a single silver coin. They were immediately kicked out of the house, feared and despised by the community, because they walked the earth carrying the weight of hundreds of stolen sins.
Imagine looking at a person and knowing their soul is a graveyard for the sins of the dead.