I was having a conversation about joining a book club yesterday and remembered having to write a twelve-page literary analysis in college on the short story The Lottery written by Shirley Jackson. The story weaves cult themes throughout it without acknowledging anything related to a cult. It is about a fictional small American community of around three hundred people that holds an annual lottery that is supposed to ensure a good harvest and protect the town from whatever they believe could happen if they stop following the tradition.

Trigger Warning!

The townspeople all gather in the village with nervous anticipation to see which family’s name is drawn. Each household’s name is written on a slip of paper, folded, and placed in an old black wooden box. After the first drawing takes place, there is a final drawing among the members of the selected household. It isn’t revealed until the end of the story that the person who “wins” the lottery is stoned to death in the village square by the other villagers. Even her young son participates in her death.

The story has been compared to Achan in Joshua 7 with some obvious similarities. In both accounts, the selection narrows from the larger group to the family and then to the individual, and the person who is marked ends up being stoned. However, for those who have eyes to see, it’s fairly easy to guess that Shirley was a cult loyal multiple after reading about her history. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Lottery was her way of telling something she witnessed growing up.

My first thought when looking back at writing that paper was that I had no SRA memories yet and, as the presenter in my system, cults were not even on my radar. I remember writing it from a place of the whole village living with dissociation and cognitive dissonance, but I didn’t see all the other symbolism back then. I analyzed a story about an entire community gathering for an annual ritual, children being taught to participate in it, a person being selected by lot, and that person being sacrificed for what the community believed was the good of everyone else without consciously connecting any of it to my own life.

I’ve since been told that the college was infiltrated and that counselors were being taught how to reprogram their clients so that they would never get to their true memories. When I look back at some of the things that happened, the red flags are mountains high. The therapist I had for several years who turned out to be my handler was also a professor at that college. Based on my experiences at the school, what I was told would make a lot of things make sense. So now I look back and wonder why a Christian university had me do an in-depth twelve-page review of a story like this when there were hundreds of other stories they could have chosen.

As my friend and I talked about the things I remembered from The Lottery, she said it reminded her of The Last Sin Eater written by Francine Rivers. It is a historical novel about a ten-year-old girl named Cadi who carries the burden of her sister’s tragic death and seeks out a man known as the sin eater because she wants to be forgiven. In the community where she lives, the sin eater comes to funerals and is believed to take the sins of the person who died onto himself. The book eventually has a redemptive ending that points to Jesus as the one who actually made atonement for sin.

That conversation sent us down the rabbit hole of being a sin eater in the cult.

What I didn’t realize until I started looking into it was the long history of there being a sin eater. There are historical accounts of sin-eating practices in parts of Wales, England, and the surrounding areas. The details varied, but food and drink were used symbolically, and the person serving as the sin eater was believed to take the sins of the deceased onto himself by consuming the food. Some accounts describe bread being placed on or near the body before it was eaten. The sin eater would then be treated as an outcast because he was believed to be carrying the sins of other people. Some historical writers even connected the practice to the biblical scapegoat, which was the story of my childhood.

I think different cults probably have different interpretations of what a sin eater is and maybe some don’t have that practice at all. I don’t know. I can only tell you what mine did and what I remember.

I was blamed for everything wrong that happened in my family. It did not matter if I was in the house or eighteen hundred miles away when it happened, it was still my fault. If something went wrong, it was always my fault. That was my normal, and everyone who knew me knew that I took responsibility for things that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

The memory I have around being a sin eater happened on my birthday when there was an exchange made of them putting their sins on me and my body being given as a gift to them to do whatever they wanted to do.

There was always an exchange, a balance of good and evil. They believed strongly in karma and in getting the child to give permission in any way necessary. This is also one of those places where I think the picture people have in their minds when they hear about ritual abuse can keep them from understanding what it actually looked like for some of us.

Someone might read about a cult getting a child to agree to something and immediately conjure up this demonic atmosphere in their mind with lit candles, chanting, smoke filling the room, and demons swirling around while terrified children are forced to participate. I’m not saying things like that never happen, but it wasn’t how they chose to get me to agree that day.

It was much easier to take a love-starved, broken little birthday girl and set her on your lap. Tell her how special she is. Tell her she is chosen and needed and that you don’t know what you would do without her. Look her in the eyes and let her agree with you because, for a few seconds, she gets to feel worth and value that she is desperate for. Gaining compliance that way can be just as effective as the torture, especially when the child has a history of being abused. This is one of many ways they hide in plain sight. I can’t tell you how many times I was reminded of the “rules” while sitting in a church pew and nobody was the wiser.

The child doesn’t understand the terms of the agreement that the adults believe they are making. She understands that somebody finally thinks she is special. She understands that she is needed. She understands that saying yes keeps that feeling going for another minute. Then the meaning of that agreement can be twisted later and used to create guilt and false responsibility. Lots of doors can be opened to the demonic with scenarios like this.

That was a huge part of how this worked for me. I was not only taught to believe that everything was my fault. I was taught that I had agreed to carry it. That makes the responsibility much harder to untangle because there are parts who don’t just believe something happened to them. They participated in choosing it, even when the “choice” was created through manipulation of a child who could not possibly understand what she was agreeing to. If a part is still stuck in trauma time, they are also still processing on the same level they were the day it occurred. They are not able to understand it from an adult perspective while still stuck in it.

In The Last Sin Eater, the little girl is spoken over by the sin eater, and she brings a required offering which is placed on her stomach before being consumed by the sin eater. That is not really that different symbolically from a child having icing smeared on her body before being presented as the birthday cake for everyone to enjoy. When I look at the symbolism through the memories I have now, the similarities are difficult for me to miss. Someone else’s sin is placed onto another person. Food is involved. A body becomes part of the offering. There is an exchange, and one person is made responsible for what belongs to everyone else.

It also helps me understand why this role followed me into adulthood long after I had lost the memories connected to where it came from. Being the person who absorbed everyone else’s guilt was not just something my family did to me emotionally. It had been built into my identity. If something happened, I automatically looked for what I had done wrong. If someone was upset, I assumed I needed to fix it. If someone pulled away from me, I must have caused it. Someone else could make a completely independent choice and I could still find a way to make myself responsible for the consequences. I have had to learn that taking responsibility for my own choices is very different from taking responsibility for everyone else’s choices.

Tonight at sundown, Yom Kippur begins, the Day of Atonement, and suddenly this entire rabbit hole is connected to something much bigger.

Leviticus 16 describes the Day of Atonement and the two goats brought before the Lord. Lots were cast over the goats. One was sacrificed as a sin offering and the other remained alive. Aaron placed both hands on the head of the living goat and confessed over it the wickedness, rebellion, and sins of Israel. Those sins were symbolically placed on the goat, and it was sent away into the wilderness carrying them.

There actually is a biblical picture of transferred sin, which makes the counterfeit make even more sense to me. The child was never supposed to become the scapegoat. The daughter was never supposed to carry the sins of the family. The survivor was never supposed to become the offering.

The enemy counterfeits what belongs to God. He takes something God established and twists it until it produces bondage instead of freedom. A child can be taught that everyone else’s safety depends on her cooperation, that their suffering is her responsibility, that if something goes wrong she caused it, and that her body can become payment. She can be taught that being chosen means being used and that love means sacrificing herself without boundaries.

She can even be made to feel special because she is carrying everyone else’s burdens, and I think that may be one of the cruelest parts because now worth and value have been attached to bondage. If I am needed because I carry everyone’s sin, laying it down can feel like losing part of my identity. If I am valuable because I absorb everyone else’s pain, what happens when I stop doing it? If being used was the closest thing I knew to being loved, then freedom can initially feel an awful lot like rejection.

That is also why simply telling a survivor, “It wasn’t your fault,” is only the beginning of trying to understand that concept. I absolutely needed people to tell me that, but those words had to travel through layer after layer of programming, beliefs, memories, agreements, and young parts who were still living in trauma time and believed someone’s life might depend on me continuing to carry the burden. I had parts who did not simply remember being blamed. They were still experiencing the responsibility as real. They believed the consequences would happen in real time if they stopped doing what they had been taught to do. That’s very different from intellectually understanding that something happened a long time ago and knowing that you were a child and it wasn’t your fault.

The sacrifices under the old covenant had to be repeated year after year, and Hebrews explains that they could never permanently take away sin. They were pointing toward something greater. Jesus did what those sacrifices could never do when He offered Himself once for all.

That means I don’t have to be anyone’s sin eater. I don’t have to balance anyone else’s darkness or pay for what somebody else did. I don’t have to carry the guilt of my family, make an exchange, or keep paying a debt because someone convinced a frightened child that she agreed to something she could never have understood. I became so accustomed to carrying everyone else’s weight that I didn’t even realize I was allowed to put it down. My job is to teach my parts that we don’t have to become the offering because Jesus already did that once for all.

Maybe the Lord wanted us to have that conversation so that I could connect the dots. I spent years being trained to carry sin that did not belong to me. Tonight, as Yom Kippur begins, I am thinking about the scapegoat carrying the sins away into the wilderness, the old accounts of the sin eater consuming the bread and walking away believed to be carrying another person’s guilt, and Tessie Hutchinson standing in the village while the people who knew her, including her own family, picked up stones.

I’m also thinking about a little birthday girl who was taught that being chosen meant carrying whatever everyone else wanted to put on her, and how easy it was to get her agreement when all she really wanted was to be loved and told that she mattered.

But more than any of that, I’m thinking about Jesus and the difference between a counterfeit sacrifice that creates bondage and the sacrifice that actually brought freedom.

I was never supposed to be the sin eater.

Neither were you.