The women from the Bangkok textile factories often had to supplement their income with prostitution. They sent their money back to their families in the village but they also donated their earnings to the temples.
The temple priests accepted their money, but labelled them whores nonetheless.
Interview with a former community development worker
Humans are curious creatures aren’t we? We condemn those we deem undesirable: the sex workers, the drug addicts, the impoverished, refugees and former prisoners (the list is endless, really). But who would we be if we had no one to condemn? Perhaps we would be forced to examine our own shadows.
I am fascinated by our collective condemnation of all that we deem undesirable. On a personal level, judgement is symptomatic of lazy thinking. Indeed, Carl Jung is reported to have said, “Thinking is difficult, that is why most people judge.” Yet on a societal level, the making of a pariah is symptomatic of collective denial. Philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jung argued that all humans possess a shadow, an unconscious repository of all the qualities we believe are undesirable. Lust, avarice, sexual perversity, vengeance, fear…anything really. But when we deny the shadow individually or collectively, we project it on to others. When we project our shadow onto other people, we condemn them for possessing the qualities that we cannot accept in ourselves.
Some societies cut out the middleman, and just assign permanent roles to the people who carry society’s shadow. Let me introduce you to the occupation of ‘sin eater.’
A ‘sin eater’ was a role assigned to an individual in Welsh villages circa the 19th century. A sin eater was often an impoverished outsider who lived on the outskirts of the village. When a villager died, the sin eater would be called to the deceased’s home. Laid out on their deathbed, a piece of stale bread would be placed on the deceased’s throat. The bread was purported to absorb the deceased person’s sins. For a pitiful sum, the ‘sin eater’ would then come forward to consume the bread soaked in sin. Thus unencumbered, the deceased could freely enter heaven.
Now, one would assume that the ‘sin eater’ would possess an elevated status. What greater role is there in a Christian community but to absolve a person of their sins? Alas, the opposite was and is true. The people who carry the sins of others are generally society’s pariahs.
Who are these people in 2021? They are the refugees who flee wars mongered by rich nations, the drug addicts who anaesthetize themselves to manage the weight of intergenerational abuse and trauma and, to get topical… the essential workers from the less affluent parts of Sydney who carry the greatest risk of contracting Covid-19 but cannot access a vaccine due to their age and income status.
They are the people who buckle under the weight of society’s foibles, the people who allow us to sleep at night with a clean conscience, because having condemned someone else, we need not condemn ourselves.
Why condemn ourselves or anyone for that matter, in the first place? Well, this is a subject for another blog post, but in my opinion, condemnation, like toxic shame, is self-defeating and destructive. Nobody flourishes when shamed, judged and relegated to the scrap heap of society. If we replaced condemnation with understanding, humanity might just begin to evolve.
For excerpts from my current draft of my novel, The Sin Eaters, please check out the following link:
Word upon Word 