A sin eater a person who is paid to purify a person's soul by taking their sins on himself.. This goes back to midieval times and has been the subject of a number of works of fiction. In one such short story an old man has died; a man who spent his life taking on the sins of everyone in his village for some three generations. A saintly and naive young man is being prepared for some form of community service, only to discover that he has been selected as the next sin eater and his first task is to eat the sins of the sin eater.