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Authors: Margaret Atwood
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with all his sins upon him,” the way Hamlet wants his murderous stepfather Claudius to die. You could pay off your debt of sins by a true repentance, but if you haven’t had time to do that, you’re cooked. That’s when you need a Sin Eater. The narrator explains:
Now it was still the custom at that time, in our part of the country, to give a fee to some poor man after a death, and then he would take bread and wine handed to him across the coffin, and eat and drink, saying,
I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man, that ye walk not over the fields and down the by-ways. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul.
And with a calm and grievous look he would go to his own place. Mostly, my Grandad used to say, Sin Eaters were such as had been Wise Men or layers of spirits, and had fallen on evil days. Or they were poor folk that had come, through some dark deed, out of the kindly life of men, and with whom none would trade, whose only food might oftentimes be the bread and wine that had crossed the coffin. In our time there were none left around Sarn. They had nearly died out, and they had to be sent for to the mountains. It was a long way to send, and they asked a big price, instead of doing it for nothing as in the old days.
It’s the dead man’s son Gideon who acts as the Sin Eater in Precious Bane ; he does so to get hold of the family farm, which he intends to work within an inch of its life so he can get rich and lord it over everyone. But his sin-eating brings bad luck to him: his drinking of the Sin Eater’s wine is described thus: “He took up the little pewter measure full of darkness . . .” Uh-oh, we think. No good will come of this. If a Sin Eater’s motives are pure and selfless, he has some hope of escaping the curse. But not if his “looks and thoughts / Are only downward bent.” As Gideon’s are.
Sin-eating was also known in the Scottish Border Country, and in Wales. Lewis Hyde, in his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, describes a similar but not identical Welsh custom of a century ago:
The coffin was placed on a bier outside the house near the door. One of the deceased’s relatives would then distribute bread and cheese to the poor, taking care to hand the gifts over the coffin. Sometimes the bread or cheese had a piece of money inside it. In expectation of the gift, the poor would have earlier gathered flowers and herbs to grace the coffin.
Hyde classes funeral gifts with a larger class he calls “threshold gifts”— gifts that help the passage from one state of life to another. In the Welsh custom, the dead person is being helped to get from this life to the next, and if this is not done properly he may be trapped on Earth as a ghost — ghosts being, notoriously, souls with unfinished business here on Earth. There are similar customs all over the world, and objects placed in burial sites or pyramids had the same function: they accompanied the journey and helped the transition. Next time you throw a flower into an open grave, ask yourself why you’re doing it.
But something extra is added with sin-eating. The bread and wine handed across the coffin is an obvious echo of the Christian communion. That sacramental meal is thought to place the soul in a state of grace, but the sin-eating bread and wine had the opposite effect: what you ate and drank was darkness, not light. The Sin Eater was thought to assimilate all the sins he’d eaten, thus freeing the souls of the dead from them, and as such he has obvious connections with scapegoat figures. He’d also pawned his own soul, as a guarantee that someone — namely himself — was prepared to pay for all those sins when the time for payment came.
However, although he’d pawned his soul, the Sin Eater hadn’t sold it. He’d placed it in hock, in return for the bread and wine and money, to be sure, but also in an act of courageous risk, because — as in a game of Pass the Parcel — should he himself die with
Now it was still the custom at that time, in our part of the country, to give a fee to some poor man after a death, and then he would take bread and wine handed to him across the coffin, and eat and drink, saying,
I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man, that ye walk not over the fields and down the by-ways. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul.
And with a calm and grievous look he would go to his own place. Mostly, my Grandad used to say, Sin Eaters were such as had been Wise Men or layers of spirits, and had fallen on evil days. Or they were poor folk that had come, through some dark deed, out of the kindly life of men, and with whom none would trade, whose only food might oftentimes be the bread and wine that had crossed the coffin. In our time there were none left around Sarn. They had nearly died out, and they had to be sent for to the mountains. It was a long way to send, and they asked a big price, instead of doing it for nothing as in the old days.
It’s the dead man’s son Gideon who acts as the Sin Eater in Precious Bane ; he does so to get hold of the family farm, which he intends to work within an inch of its life so he can get rich and lord it over everyone. But his sin-eating brings bad luck to him: his drinking of the Sin Eater’s wine is described thus: “He took up the little pewter measure full of darkness . . .” Uh-oh, we think. No good will come of this. If a Sin Eater’s motives are pure and selfless, he has some hope of escaping the curse. But not if his “looks and thoughts / Are only downward bent.” As Gideon’s are.
Sin-eating was also known in the Scottish Border Country, and in Wales. Lewis Hyde, in his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, describes a similar but not identical Welsh custom of a century ago:
The coffin was placed on a bier outside the house near the door. One of the deceased’s relatives would then distribute bread and cheese to the poor, taking care to hand the gifts over the coffin. Sometimes the bread or cheese had a piece of money inside it. In expectation of the gift, the poor would have earlier gathered flowers and herbs to grace the coffin.
Hyde classes funeral gifts with a larger class he calls “threshold gifts”— gifts that help the passage from one state of life to another. In the Welsh custom, the dead person is being helped to get from this life to the next, and if this is not done properly he may be trapped on Earth as a ghost — ghosts being, notoriously, souls with unfinished business here on Earth. There are similar customs all over the world, and objects placed in burial sites or pyramids had the same function: they accompanied the journey and helped the transition. Next time you throw a flower into an open grave, ask yourself why you’re doing it.
But something extra is added with sin-eating. The bread and wine handed across the coffin is an obvious echo of the Christian communion. That sacramental meal is thought to place the soul in a state of grace, but the sin-eating bread and wine had the opposite effect: what you ate and drank was darkness, not light. The Sin Eater was thought to assimilate all the sins he’d eaten, thus freeing the souls of the dead from them, and as such he has obvious connections with scapegoat figures. He’d also pawned his own soul, as a guarantee that someone — namely himself — was prepared to pay for all those sins when the time for payment came.
However, although he’d pawned his soul, the Sin Eater hadn’t sold it. He’d placed it in hock, in return for the bread and wine and money, to be sure, but also in an act of courageous risk, because — as in a game of Pass the Parcel — should he himself die with
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