Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (7 page)

Thus we know by its title that Webb’s
Precious Bane
will have as one of its themes a destructive obsession with riches; and so it does. It’s set in nineteenth-century Shropshire, where old folkways have lingered on. Gideon Sarn’s father has died of a stroke, with his boots on — an unlucky thing, as he was assumed to have died “in his wrath, with all his sins upon him,” the way Hamlet wants his murderous stepfather Claudius to die. You could pay off your debt of sins by a true repentance, but if you haven’t had time to do that, you’re cooked. That’s when you need a Sin Eater. The narrator explains:

Now it was still the custom at that time, in our part of the country, to give a fee to some poor man after a death, and then he would take bread and wine handed to him across the coffin, and eat and drink, saying,

I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man, that ye walk not over the fields and down the by-ways. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul.

And with a calm and grievous look he would go to his own place. Mostly, my Grandad used to say, Sin Eaters were such as had been Wise Men or layers of spirits, and had fallen on evil days. Or they were poor folk that had come, through some dark deed, out of the kindly life of men, and with whom none would trade, whose only food might oftentimes be the bread and wine that had crossed the coffin. In our time there were none left around Sarn. They had nearly died out, and they had to be sent for to the mountains. It was a long way to send, and they asked a big price, instead of doing it for nothing as in the old days.

It’s the dead man’s son Gideon who acts as the Sin Eater in
Precious Bane
; he does so to get hold of the family farm, which he intends to work within an inch of its life so he can get rich and lord it over everyone. But his sin-eating brings bad luck to him: his drinking of the Sin Eater’s wine is described thus: “He took up the little pewter measure full of darkness . . .” Uh-oh, we think. No good will come of this. If a Sin Eater’s motives are pure and selfless, he has some hope of escaping the curse. But not if his “looks and thoughts / Are only downward bent.” As Gideon’s are.

Sin-eating was also known in the Scottish Border Country, and in Wales. Lewis Hyde, in his book
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,
describes a similar but not identical Welsh custom of a century ago:

The coffin was placed on a bier outside the house near the door. One of the deceased’s relatives would then distribute bread and cheese to the poor, taking care to hand the gifts over the coffin. Sometimes the bread or cheese had a piece of money inside it. In expectation of the gift, the poor would have earlier gathered flowers and herbs to grace the coffin.

Hyde classes funeral gifts with a larger class he calls “threshold gifts”— gifts that help the passage from one state of life to another. In the Welsh custom, the dead person is being helped to get from this life to the next, and if this is not done properly he may be trapped on Earth as a ghost — ghosts being, notoriously, souls with unfinished business here on Earth. There are similar customs all over the world, and objects placed in burial sites or pyramids had the same function: they accompanied the journey and helped the transition. Next time you throw a flower into an open grave, ask yourself why you’re doing it.

But something extra is added with sin-eating. The bread and wine handed across the coffin is an obvious echo of the Christian communion. That sacramental meal is thought to place the soul in a state of grace, but the sin-eating bread and wine had the opposite effect: what you ate and drank was darkness, not light. The Sin Eater was thought to assimilate all the sins he’d eaten, thus freeing the souls of the dead from them, and as such he has obvious connections with scapegoat figures. He’d also pawned his own soul, as a guarantee that someone — namely himself — was prepared to pay for all those sins when the time for payment came.

However, although he’d pawned his soul, the Sin Eater hadn’t sold it. He’d placed it in hock, in return for the bread and wine and money, to be sure, but also in an act of courageous risk, because — as in a game of Pass the Parcel — should he himself die with his boots on, and should no Sin Eater appear for him, he’d get stuck with the entire bundle of sins. The pawnbroker was the Devil, of course: it was he who’d collect the pawned soul, unless the soul of the Sin Eater was redeemed just as you’d redeem a pawned object from the shop. It’s worth remarking here that a “pawn” could also have the meaning of “a hostage.” Hostages then — as they are today — were people held in captivity, to be exchanged either for other people or for sums of money. The Sin Eater’s soul thus acted as a hostage as well as a substitute for the soul of the man whose sins he’d eaten. No wonder the Sin Eater in
Precious Bane
goes to “his own place” with “a calm and grievous look.”

The first hostage of this sort that we know about in mythology would appear to be Geshtinanna, from the Sumerian myth of Inanna. The life-goddess Inanna loses a power struggle with Erishkigal, the goddess of Death, and is killed. But it won’t do for the goddess of Life to be dead — bad for the garden, not to mention every other living thing on Earth — so another god makes two golemlike robotic beings who are not organically alive, and therefore not subject to death. These rescue Inanna and bring her back to the light. However, Erishkegal says that the number of the dead must remain complete or the cosmic balance will be upset, so a substitute has to be found to take Inanna’s place in the Sumerian underworld. The victim is the shepherd-king Dumuzi, Inanna’s mortal consort. But Dumuzi’s sister Geshtinanna offers herself as a substitute, and the gods are so impressed with her spirit of self-sacrifice that they split the death term — six months underground for Dumuzi, and six for Geshtinanna. Geshtinanna is thus probably the first example of one individual redeeming another through offering herself as a substitute, which is the essential idea of the Sin Eater: something is owed; the person who owes it can’t pay; then someone else steps forward and pays the debt, or takes the place of the indebted one. The parallels with Christianity are obvious.

Every human pattern exists in both a positive and a negative version. In the negative version of this pattern, instead of offering up yourself as a substitute for someone else, you offer up someone else as a substitute for you. A good example of the negative version may be found in George Orwell’s dystopian novel
1984.
The hapless protagonist, Winston Smith, has been sent to the dreaded Room 101. Room 101 always contains the worst thing in the world, which in Winston’s case happens to be rats. The rats have been starved, and are about to be let loose on his eyes.

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then — no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment — one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting, over and over:

“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear off her face, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

Julia, by the way, is Winston‘s beloved mistress. This substitution of another for yourself is a very familiar concept to students of early religions, as it lies behind the practice of both animal sacrifice and human sacrifice. You owe a debt to the gods, so let something or someone else pay it for you. Readers of the Old Testament will find — especially in Leviticus and Deuteronomy — long lists of what animal you can have ritually killed in payment for which sin, trespass, or guilt of your own, or in repayment for an especially large favour granted by God. This animal redeems that one: you can for instance redeem a first-born donkey with a lamb, which must be killed in its place.

The sacrifices in the Middle East and Greece could be human ones, at least for important occasions. King Agamemnon, leader of the Trojan War expeditionary forces, sacrifices his daughter, as the Old Testament military leader Jephthah sacrifices his: what both of them get in return is victory. Joshua, after his conquests of Canaanite cities, slaughtered all the captives and also their animals as an offering to God, just as Elijah slaughters the 450 priests of Baal. The first-born of any species, including the human species, was thought to belong to God in any case — thus Abraham’s lack of surprise when God tells him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. The introduction of animal substitution for human victims is said to be illustrated by this story, as in the event it’s a ram rather than a child that gets its throat slit. However, human sacrifice — mostly of children — was a widespread practice in the ancient world; and these were substitution sacrifices, redeeming the debts you owed or paying the gods for favours. Instead of yourself, you offered up a suitable bit of your property — a bull, a dove, a child, a slave — muttering all the while some version of “Do it to Julia.”

Happily, by the time of the Book of Numbers, money equivalents could be offered instead. Think of that the next time you drop your envelope into the collection plate at church. That twenty-dollar bill is a substitute for your getting your throat cut, and cheap at the price.

WHICH BRINGS US
to the Christian religion. Christ is called the Redeemer, a term drawn directly from the language of debt and pawning or pledging, and thus also from that of substitute sacrifice. In fact, the whole theology of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them, and how you might get out of paying by having someone else pay instead. And it rests, too, on a long pre-Christian history of scapegoat figures — including human sacrifices — who take your sins away for you.

Here’s the condensed version, and I apologize if through having squashed it into so short a form I don’t do it full justice:

God gave Man life and was therefore owed a debt of absolute gratitude and obedience. Man, however, did not repay this debt as he should have done, but reneged on it through an act of disobedience. In this way he put himself and his descendants permanently in hock — for, as we know if we’ve ever dealt with wills, a person’s debts devolve on the heirs and assigns of the debtor. As regards the built-in debt of sin, the creditor is sometimes thought to be Death, sometimes the Devil: this entity collects either (a) your life or (b) your soul — or both — as payment for the debt you yourself still owe due to your rascally distant ancestor.

The debt load of sin you’ve inherited from Adam — “Original Sin,” as it’s known — which has been added to through your own probably not very original sins — can never be repaid by you, because the sum total is too large. So unless someone steps forward on your behalf, your soul will become (a) extinct or (b) a slave of the Devil in Hell, to be disposed of in some unpleasant way. Various of these ways are described by Dante, where Hell is ruled over by a really horrible version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, ingeniously bent on making the punishment fit the crime. If that’s too medieval for you, a shorter rendition can be had in the sermon on Hell incorporated into James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

During their lifetimes, all souls not in a state of grace or actually sold to the Devil fully and finally are believed to be in an intermediate condition: in peril, but not fully damned as yet. Christ is thought to have redeemed all souls, in theory at least, by having acted as a cosmic Sin Eater — he took everyone else’s sins upon himself at the Crucifixion, where, with Geshtinanna-like selflessness, he offered himself up as the substitute human sacrifice to end all substitute human sacrifices — thereby redeeming the huge Original Sin debt. But individuals must also participate in this drama: in effect, you must redeem yourself by allowing yourself to be redeemed.

Thus all the souls of the living can be thought of as residing in a pawnshop of the soul, neither entirely slaves nor entirely free. Time is running out. Will you be redeemed before the clock strikes midnight and the Grim Reaper arrives — or, worse, Old Nick in his red suit, ready to pop you into his infernal collecting sack? Hang by your fingertips! It’s never over till it’s over!

This is what gives the Christian life its dramatic tension: you never know. You never know, that is, unless you’re a believer in the Antinomian Heresy. If you are, you’re so certain of your own salvation that even the most despicable things you do are right, because it’s you doing them. Here’s a summation of this position, taken from a 2005 article in the London
Telegraph
in which the author, Sam Leith, suggests that Tony Blair, the ex–prime minister of England, was in the grip of this heresy:

Roughly put, antinomianism — and this will have to be roughly put, since I make no claim to be a theologian — is the idea that justification by faith liberates you from the need to do good works. Righteousness overrides the law — which was, arguably, the PM’s position on Iraq.

It can be seen, in some way, as the squaring of a tricky theological circle: the Calvinist idea that the Elect have been singled out for salvation as part of the divine scheme long before any of them were twinkles in the twinkles in their ancestors’ eyes. If justification by faith, rather than by works, is the high road to heaven, the logical extreme of the position is that works don’t matter at all.

Divine grace, over which we have no control, brings about faith. Faith brings about salvation. Ergo, if you’re not touched by grace, there’s nothing much you can do about it except look forward to an immensely long retirement having your toes warmed by the devil in the pitchfork hotel.