and the unsettling and lurid feeling it cast over me has never gone away. "Sin eating" was a ritual practiced during the late middle ages whereupon a professional sin eater would, for a purse of coins, consume a sumptuous meal virtually atop the body of someone who had already or was about to gasp their last breath, thereby "consuming" his sins and allowing him entrance into heaven. This was the subject matter of an entire 1 hour episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" and starred Richard Thomas as the pitiable teenage son of a line of male sin eaters who is promised escape from his terrible heritage, only to be starved, beguiled and manipulated by his mother into "eating" the sins of his dying father after all. The episode was expertly crafted and succeeded completely in capturing both the psychological and economic depression of an impoverished family caught literally between the devil and the deep blue sea in a time of ignorance and oppression when a person's faith kept him in poverty via promise of purchase into paradise. The hollow look in the starving boy's eyes as he finally realized his mother's betrayal, paused, and then began ravenously ripping into the cooked flesh of the enormous feast she had prepared, his father's corpse beneath it all, will remain with me forever. The theme being the same, you might want to pass "The Order" up if truly depraved subject matter gets your goat (no pun intended).
