You might be familiar with the concept of washing one's sins away, but in this gallery we delve into a different concept: that of eating one's sins. This was the role of the sin-eater, a person who would (literally) eat sins, in the form of bread, off the top of a corpse so that the deceased person would gain a direct ticket to heaven.
Curious? Click through the following gallery and learn more about this bizarre ritual from the 18th and 19th centuries.