Sin Eater

"Have you ever heard of the sin cake eater? He would come to the funeral and he would eat all the little cakes they'd lay out on the corpse. He ate up all the sins. And you know what? The sin cake eater was very well paid. And so long as there was another one who came along after he died, it all worked out. So this might not be the best situation, but there are harder jobs and you get to eat an amazing amount of cake."

— Gerri Kellman to Tom Wambsgans, Succession, "Sad Sack Wasp Trap"

In mythology and folklore, a Sin-Eater is a person who consumes a ritual meal as a means of spiritually taking on the sins of a deceased person. The food is believed to absorb the sins of the deceased, thus absolving them of their sins. Thus, the Sin-Eater carries the sins of the deceased and were often feared and shunned for it.

In fiction, Sin-Eaters generally come in two flavors.

• A person who absorbs the sins of other people, usually while they are still alive. A lot of artistic license can be taken with how the Sin-Eater goes about it and it is rare to include the ritual meal. This type of Sin-Eater may also run the risk of being corrupted by the sins they absorb.

• The metaphorical Sin-Eater. This person believes they are absolving people of their sins or is at least believed by others to be doing so. They are most likely to be a Serial Killer who targets sinners, or people they believe to be sinners. In some cases, they may also be people who commit morally questionable actions to spare others from having to do so. To qualify, the concept of sin must be prominent in regard to these characters' motivations.

Some minor overlap with Sparing Them the Dirty Work and Token Evil Teammate.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Digimon Ghost Game: The Monster of the Week in "Impurity" is Kuzuhamon, a Digimon who seeks to cleanse all humans of their "impurities" by extracting it from their bodies, leaving them as zombie-like wooden marionettes who become obsessed with making everyone and everything around them clean. This is creepy enough, but Kuzuhamon's idea of impurities are rather absurd, like arriving late to meet a friend and dirtying a library book.
• Fairy Tail: An allegedly amnesiac Jellal uses his Flame of Rebuke to feed his magic power to Natsu so the latter can fight against Zero. Zero comments that Natsu eating the Flame of Rebuke essentially means he's accepting Jellal's sins.

Comic Books

• Doctor Who (Titan): The Sin-Eaters focuses the Hesguard Institute's attempt to cure criminals by transferring their negative emotions into inert artificial bodies called sin eaters. Not only does the process fail (the patients inevitably suffer psychotic breaks and commit even worse crimes), when they use it on the Doctor, his sin eater comes to life, wakes up all the other sin eaters, and tries to kill everyone on the station.
• Finder: Jaeger Ayres, the protagonist of many story arcs, is a ritual sin-eater for the tribe of nomadic Ascian people from whom he is partially descended. As such, he is simultaneously needed but also feared and distrusted, which metaphorically overlaps with his other on-and-off role as a sort of private eye.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Ghost Rider: Two years before the first appearance of Stan Carter, a villain named Sin-Eater was introduced in issue #80 of Ghost Rider. Ethan Domblue was a pastor whose obsession with having a sinless congregation drew the attention of the villain Centurious, who granted Domblue the ability to "eat" a person's sins, leaving them in a passive, "sinless" state. What Domblue didn't know was by placing his parishioners' souls in the Crystal of Souls, he was creating an army of zombie-like slaves loyal to Centurious.
  • Spider-Man:
    • The Death of Jean DeWolff: The Sin-Eater, aka Stan Carter, was once a SHIELD agent that participated in an experiment to test the effects of phencyclidine on human strength and endurance. The experiments affected Carter psychologically and he resigned after the program was shut down. It was presumed the effects of the experiments were gone until Carter suffered a mental breakdown after his partner was killed, resulting in a murderous obsession with cleansing the world of people he saw as sinners.
    • The Amazing Spider-Man (2018): Carter is resurrected by Kindred during the Sins Rising arc. He is given the ability to cleanse people of their sins, turning them meek and repentant. He also gains the ability to steal the powers of anyone he cleanses, making him a much bigger threat than he was the last time he faced Spider-Man.
    • Sins Rising Prelude: This one-shot focusing on Stan Carter's origin features a fairly accurate take on the concept. After Carter's grandfather dies, his superstitious congregation calls forth a Sin-Eater to cleanse him of sin so his soul will be allowed into Heaven. They leave food on his chest to represent the dead man's sins, which the Sin-Eater consumes. Carter's narration even acknowledges how Sin-Eaters were shunned and hated, despite making a great sacrifice to ensure people were welcomed into God's kingdom.
• Usagi Yojimbo: Jei is a former priest who believes he has been chosen by the gods to cleanse the world of sin. Unfortunately, Jei has a rather twisted view of what qualifies as sin, leading to him killing many innocent people.

Films — Live-Action

• The Bourne Legacy: Eric Byer describes himself and his team as "sin eaters" who commit morally indefensible but absolutely necessary actions so others on their side don't have to.
• Hellraiser: Judgement: The Assessor is a zig-zagged example. He eats the sins of the damned (in the form of typed texts), but his main job is to assess (hence the name) each soul's charges before their trial in Hell. Especially heinous crimes will make him feel sick and barf out the sheets of paper he has swallowed.
• The Order: William Eden is a Sin Eater, an individual with the power to remove all taint of sin from a person's soul just before death. Eden has grown tired of carrying the burden of other people's sins and tricks Alex into killing him and becoming the new Sin Eater.
• Saw: The Jigsaw Killer targets people whom he believes to be sinners (with the "sins" they've committed ranging from usual crimes like murder to smoking), normally putting them in Death Traps in order to "rehabilitate" them. He doesn't always follow this pattern, however, as he has also abducted people who had specifically wronged him in the past, and he put a number of his victims in helpless situations, be it so that they have to be saved by someone else or for outright sacrificial purposes.
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: Sybok gathers his army by using a mind meld to cleanse people of their traumatic memories. Scotty even calls him a sin eater in the Novelization.

Literature

• Beasts Made Of Night: Sin-eaters like the protagonist are born with the power to absorb others' guilt into their bodies, fighting it into submission after a mage calls it out as a sin-beast. They're a marginalized, exploited group in his hometown, forced to serve the rich and powerful until the accumulated guilt reduces them to Empty Shells. However, the protagonist learns that there's much more to their abilities than they were taught in the sequel.
• Bequin: On the world of Queen Mab, individuals convicted of great sacrilege by the Ecclesiarchy become Curst, people sentenced to lifelong public slavery with the description of their sin tattooed on their bodies. As part of their penance, a Curst can take on the sins and crimes of others, adding to their tattoos. This is considered a redemptive act of selflessness, but it also means especially fanatical or desperate Curst can double as unpaid mercenaries — if you want to murder someone, you ask a Curst to burden themselves with that crime, taking the sin, its guilt, and its consequences on themselves to spare you from it. The greater the original sin, the more additional sins a Curst will end up taking on to redeem themselves; prolific Curst can have up to a dozen. Or if you're Renner Lightburn, you can end up with thousands.
• The Last Sin-Eater: This Christian novel is set in an 1850s town that is heavily reliant on a sin-eater. Things change when a young girl in the town befriends a preacher and is converted to Christianity.
• Made To Order: Robots and Revolution: In the short story titled Sin Eater, people are uploaded to the Artificial Afterlife by robots that are officially named "transfer assistants" but are colloquially referred to as sin eaters as they allow a person to leave behind bad memories, regrets, or other negative emotions when they are uploaded.
• Master And Commander: A subplot involves a historically accurate version of a Sin-Eater. The crewman Cheslin was a sin-eater who symbolically ate the sins of the deceased, a role for which he is stigmatized. He goes to sea to try and escape the stigma but is rejected by the ship's crew and almost starves to death before Maturin takes him on as a Loblolly boy (i.e. an unskilled medical assistant) but has to keep an eye on him as he has a habit of mixing substances into the crew's medicine as revenge for their mistreatment of him.
• Outlander: A Breath of Snow and Ashes: A sin-eater makes an appearance at the funeral of Mrs. Wilson, Hiram Crombie's mother-in-law.
• World of the Five Gods Humans who host a demon are Sorcerers; if the demon becomes ascendant over the human, or the pair commits serious crimes, the Temple will send a Saint of the Bastard who acts as a gateway back to the chaos from which demons form. The Saint usually experiences this as eating something very unpleasant.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow: The flashback plot in "The Sin-Eater" has Anatoly compare Oliver's need to take out one of Anatoly's enemies to how a Sin-Eater is compelled to take on the sins of others.
• The Blacklist: In Season 2, Red tells Elizabeth that he is a sin-eater; he absorbs the misdeeds of others, darkening his soul to keep theirs pure. Elizabeth challenges him to tell her what she's done in life that requires him to act like he's absorbing sins from her. He refuses to answer the question at the time, but she does find out later on.
• Series/Fargo: Season 5 has the mysterious hitman Ole Munch (pronounced Oolah Moonk) who is either a genuinely supernatural version of the trope or at least truly believes himself to be. He follows a personal code driven by blood-debt and states he is centuries old and unable to die or sleep as a result of the ritual where he (a starving man in Medieval Wales) got paid to eat the sins of the rich. The series ends with Dot telling him (drawing on her non-supernatural history of abuse at the hands of powerful people who felt entitled to treat her as they pleased and were morally indignant when she refused to simply take it,) that the cure to eating sin is to eat something made with genuine love and joy, and invites him to partake of the meal she's making with her loving family. His first bite of their homemade cookies causes a sobbing, relaxed smile to break across his face for the first time in god knows how long.
• Forever Knight: "Blackwing" features a partially trained Native American/First Nations shaman named Marian Blackwing who tries to take the "darkness" out of Nick. While she doesn't cure Nick's vampirism, she does succeed in removing most of his hate and anger. Unfortunately, due to her lack of complete training, Marian is unable to transfer the darkness she took from Nick into a harmless inanimate object and winds up corrupted by it.
• Grimm: In "The Believer", traveling preacher Dwight Eleazar professes to remove people's sins by taking them into his body, whereupon he is possessed by Satan until he successfully expels him. However, this is all an act; he's actually a Furis Rubian Wesen using his woge to make it appear as if he's being possessed.
• Highlander had an old friend of Duncan's, a Native American shaman named Kol'tek, who was a "hyoka" and could absorb another person's evil (explaining it to Duncan, he used the analogy of a cup about to overflow, and that his cup had no bottom, therefore could never be filled). He certainly had this ability and was able to use it, but being immortal, it eventually built up to the point where he knew he had to stop (sometime in the 1950s). Forty-odd years later, he found himself up against an Immortal who he couldn't just let go, and after killing the man, was overloaded by what's referred to as a "Dark Quickening" and became as bad as all the people he'd cured.
• Night Gallery: In "The Sins of the Fathers", a sin eater is dying and his starving son (who has not been trained as a sin eater) must go to the home of a wealthy dead man in his father's place. The son pretends to have absorbed the wealthy man's sins, then returns home with the uneaten food. When he gets home, his mother tells him he needs to eat the food and take on the sins of his now-deceased father. As he does so, he screams as he absorbs his father's sins.
• Sleepy Hollow: In season 1, Crane and Abby meet Henry Parrish, a Sin-Eater whose power to see and absorb people's sins has resulted in him becoming a recluse. It turns out Henry is Crane's long-lost warlock son Jeremy and a servant of Moloch. While he does indeed have Sin-Eater powers, it is likely him being a recluse was part of his ruse to deceive Crane and Abby.
• Succession: In "Sad Sack Wasp Trap", Gerri tries to persuade Tom to cover up evidence regarding several illegal acts committed on the company's cruise lines. As seen in the page quote, Gerri likens this to Tom being a sin eater.

Mythology and Religion

• Aztec Mythology: Tlazolteotl is the Aztec goddess of vice, purification, steam baths, lust, and filth. A patroness of adulterers, Tlazolteotl is said to have a redemptive role in religious practices. At the end of an individual's life, they were allowed to confess misdeeds to her, and according to legend she would cleanse their soul by "eating its filth".
• The Bible: Christ's death on the Cross made him the Perfect Sacrifice needed to reforge the connection between humanity and God by taking on all the sins of mankind. He also used the weight of those sins as ballast to bring him into Hell, where he fought the devil for three days. Presumably, he left them there.

Tabletop Games

• Dark Heresy: Falling neatly into the second flavor, sin eaters are a specialized type of warrior-zealot employed by the Oblationists, a radical sect of the Inquisition that believes in performing a spiritual Heroic Sacrifice by wielding the powers of the Warp and damning themselves for the sake of mankind (a task they consider only fit for themselves). Sin eaters are ritually defiled, confessing every sin they've ever committed and being branded or tattooed for each one — the marks are a mix of holy scripture, daemonic text, and even stranger symbols, which serves to provide the prospective sin eater resistance to all supernatural sources of harm, be they daemons, Psychic Powers or holy miracles. This nets them a load of corruption points, but upon completion, the sin eater is deemed "incapable of further or greater sin" and entrusted with daemonic weaponry to wield on behalf of their masters.
• The 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Horror supplement features both a Corruption mechanic and a "corruption eater" monster. These Humanoid Abominations can literally drain the taint (physical corruption) of a victim with their bite attacks, gaining temporary combat bonuses in the process. This can help characters trying to reduce their corruption level, but other characters who have taken feats or a Prestige Class about embracing corruption may find themselves losing access to their abilities. Corruption eaters can also consume taint to power a Breath Weapon that can increase victims' depravity scores, thus draining physical corruption but inflicting mental corruption in its place.
• In Princess: The Hopeful, a Noble that reaches 0 Belief turns into a Dethroned, a powerful monster feared by Nobles and The Dark alike. A fellow Noble can make an effort to take on the Dethroned's inner demon and angst as their own to resolve. This redeems the Dethroned and let them continue the cycle of reincarnation.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy XIV: Invoked in the concept of the Sin Eaters. They are typically mindless monsters who seek to kill other beings for their aether. The more powerful Sin Eaters, called Lightwardens, can "forgive" the creatures they attack, gruesomely and permanently mutating them into newborn sin eaters. Most of these creatures tend to be named as "forgiven" sins (Forgiven Ambition, Forgiven Hypocrisy, Forgiven Deceit, etc). Killing a Lightwarden only turns you into its replacement. It's not until the Warrior of Darkness comes around that the Lightwardens can be permanently killed.
• Lobotomy Corporation has One Sin and a Hundred Good Deeds, the first Abnormality of every playthrough. It takes the form of a crucified skull (Or rather, the crucifix is impaled within the skull) wearing a crown of thorns. It somehow feeds on the sins of those who confess to it, bringing relief to that person. Its profile says that if a grave and traumatic enough sin is confessed to it, One Sin will straight up remove the memory of it from the confessor's mind for seemingly no other reason than to help them.
• Mortal Kombat: Deception: Nightwolf undergoes a Sin-Eater ritual to absorb the sins of his entire tribe. This comes with the risk of being potentially corrupted by the sins he has absorbed and he can't even fall asleep. The ritual pays off when Nightwolf uses the sins to bind Onaga in the Netherrealm.
• Trauma Team: The victim of the third Forensics case is Alma Parker, an elderly woman who was infected with the Rosalia virus. The disease causes her to suffer from auditory hallucinations, which she interprets as the voice of God, and bruises, which she believes to be His sigil. Alma eventually concludes she was chosen to be "the Beast of the Lord", whose mission is to carve His sigil on sinners and kill them in order to save their souls. This leads her to murder her own daughter and attempt to do the same to her husband, who kills her in self-defense.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons: In "American History X Cellent", Montgomery Burns goes to prison, and in a parody of The Green Mile, meets up with a Captain Ersatz of Michael Clarke Duncan's character, who extracts the evil energy from Burns' body.

Real Life

• In 17th Century England and Wales, sin-eaters were poor people hired to take on a dead person's sins by eating a loaf of bread that had been laid out on the corpse.
• The concept of the "scapegoat," (not to be confused with the trope The Scapegoat) is a purification ritual in Jewish tradition. In this tradition, one of a pair of kid goats is sacrificed, while the other goat, which carries the sins and wrongdoings of the community, is released into the wild. In Christian traditions, Jesus Christ, who is known as the "lamb of God," is a scapegoat of humanity to free them of sin.

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