Promethean: The Created

What's in a Name?
Geist Preview for June 29
Posted: 2009-06-29

It’s a curious phrase, “Sin-Eater,” and not one that immediately suggests the nature of the person it describes. What does it mean, and out of all the terms that could have been applied to these geist-haunted souls, why was it chosen? The term itself comes from medieval England, and originally referred to a man who would, when someone passed on, perform a brief ritual over the corpse, eating bread and drinking ale to symbolically “eat” the dead man’s sins, allowing his soul to speed on to heaven rather than linger on earth. The sins of the dead were thus passed on to the still-living sin-eater, who damned himself for the good of others. Similar practices can be found in ancient cultures around the world, from the Aztecs to the Egyptians.

Exactly when the term came to apply to men and women who bound their souls to geists remains unclear, but the name goes back at least to the 17th century, and likely spread with the rise of the British Empire. Sin-Eaters see the name as emblematic of what they do, if not precisely correct in its technical details. Whether they act as advocates or judges, messengers or avengers, Sin-Eaters bring a kind of peace to the dead and allow them to move on from this world. Whether or not they damn themselves for the good of others is a fiercely debated question.

There’s also a more literal, less pleasant shade of meaning in the name. The fact of the matter is that geists are not, as a rule, pleasant entities. Even the most benign and human-seeming ghosts can be subject to strange compulsions or fits of emotion, and geists are far more alien than most shades. Their goals can range from the inscrutable to the outright horrific: a geist of guns and urban violence might only want its host to stir up a little panic by emptying a clip into the air in a residential neighborhood, or it might decide it wants to ride along while its host executes a dozen young men and women with the gun that killed it. Even Sin-Eaters who have achieved a measure of synergy with their geists wonder — and fear — what the spirit might do if it were cut loose to indulge its every whim.
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