The kern of the title is an otherworldly trickster figure who performs a series of miracles; after inducing twenty armed men to kill each other, he produces herbs from his bag and instructs his host's gatekeeper to place them within the jaws of each dead man to bring him back to life. At the end of the tale, the mysterious visitor is revealed as Manannán mac Lir, the Irish god known in other stories for his herd of pigs that offer eternal feasting from their self-renewing flesh. Scholars have frequently suggested that the use of a viaticum in the Christian rite for the dying reflected preexisting religious practice, with Charon’s obol replaced by a more acceptably Christian sacrament. In one miraculous story, recounted by Pope Innocent III in a letter dated 1213, the coins in a moneybox were said literally to have been transformed into communion wafers. Because of the viaticum’s presumed pre-Christian origin, an anti-Catholic historian of religion at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries propagandized the practice, stating that "it was from the heathens [that] the papists borrowed it." Contemporary scholars are more likely to explain the borrowing in light of the deep-seated conservatism of burial practices or as a form of religious syncretism motivated by a psychological need for continuity. Among Christians, the practice of burying a corpse with a coin in its mouth was never widespread enough to warrant condemnation from the Church, but the substitute rite came under official scrutiny; the viaticum should not be, but often was, placed in the mouth after death, apparently out of a superstitious desire for its magical protection. By the time Augustine wrote his "Confessions", "African bishops had forbidden the celebration of the eucharist in the presence of the corpse. This was necessary to stop the occasional practice of placing the eucharistic bread in the mouth of the dead, a viaticum which replaced the coin needed to pay Charon’s fare." Pope Gregory I, in his biography of Benedict of Nursia, tells the story of a monk whose body was twice ejected from his tomb; Benedict advised the family to restore the dead man to his resting place with the viaticum placed on his chest. The placement suggests a functional equivalence with the "Goldblattkreuze" and the Orphic gold tablets; its purpose — to assure the deceased’s successful passage to the afterlife — is analogous to that of Charon’s obol and the "Totenpässe" of mystery initiates, and in this case it acts also as a seal to block the dead from returning to the world of the living.