The Lottery in Babylon

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence,
ignominy, imprisonment. Look here-- my right hand has no index finger. Look here--through this gash in my cape
you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo--it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full,
this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who on
nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the half-light of dawn, in a
cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar
year, I was declared invisible--I would cry out and no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be
beheaded. I have known that thing the Greeks knew not--uncertainty. In a chamber of brass, as I faced the
strangler's silent scarf, hope did not abandon me; in the river of delights, panic has not failed me.
Heraclides Ponticus reports, admiringly, that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrhus, and before that,
Euphorbus, and before that, some other mortal; in order to recall similar vicissitudes, I have no need of
death, nor even of imposture.

I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution--the Lottery-- which is unknown in other nations, or at
work in them imperfectly or secretly. I have not delved into this institution's history. I know that sages
cannot agree. About its mighty purposes I know as much as a man untutored in astrology might know about the
moon. Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have
thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart. Now, far from
Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the Lottery, and about the blasphemous
conjectures that shrouded men whisper in the half-light of dawn or evening.

My father would tell how once, long ago--centuries? years?--the lottery in Babylon was a game played by
commoners. He would tell (though whether this is true or not, I cannot say) how barbers would take a man's
copper coins and give back rectangles made of bone or parchment and adorned with symbols. Then, in broad
daylight, a drawing would be held; those smiled upon by fate would, with no further corroboration by chance,
win coins minted of silver. The procedure, as you can see, was rudimentary.

Naturally, those so-called "lotteries" were a failure. They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealed not
to all a man's faculties, but only to his hopefulness. Public indifference soon meant that the merchants who
had founded these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone tried something new: including among the list
of lucky numbers a few unlucky draws. This innovation meant that those who bought those numbered rectangles
now had a twofold chance: they might win a sum of money or they might be required to pay a fine--sometimes a
considerable one. As one might expect, that small risk (for every thirty "good" numbers there was one
ill-omened one) piqued the public's interest. Babylonians flocked to buy tickets. The man who bought none was
considered a pusillanimous wretch, a man with no spirit of adventure. In time, this justified contempt found a
second target: not just the man who didn't play, but also the man who lost and paid the fine. The Company (as
it was now beginning to be known) had to protect the interest of the winners, who could not be paid their
prizes unless the pot contained almost the entire amount of the fines. A lawsuit was filed against the losers:
the judge sentenced them to pay the original fine, plus court costs, or spend a number of days in jail. In
order to thwart the Company, they all chose jail. From that gauntlet thrown down by a few men sprang the
Company's omnipotence--its ecclesiastical, metaphysical force.

Some time after this, the announcements of the numbers drawn began to leave out the lists of fines and simply
print the days of prison assigned to each losing number. That shorthand, as it were, which went virtually
unnoticed at the time, was of utmost importance: It was the first appearance of nonpecuniary elements in the
lottery. And it met with great success--indeed, the Company was forced by its players to increase the number
of unlucky draws.

As everyone knows, the people of Babylon are great admirers of logic, and even of symmetry. It was
inconsistent that lucky numbers should pay off in round silver coins while unlucky ones were measured in days
and nights of jail. Certain moralists argued that the possession of coins did not always bring about
happiness, and that other forms of happiness were perhaps more direct.

The lower-caste neighborhoods of the city voiced a different complaint. The members of the priestly class
gambled heavily, and so enjoyed all the vicissitudes of terror and hope; the poor (with understandable, or
inevitable, envy) saw themselves denied access to that famously delightful, even sensual, wheel. The fair and
reasonable desire that all men and women, rich and poor, be able to take part equally in the Lottery inspired
indignant demonstrations--the memory of which, time has failed to dim. Some stubborn souls could not (or
pretended they could not) understand that this was a novus ordo seclorum, a necessary stage of history.... A
slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue
burned out. The code of law provided the same sentence for stealing a lottery ticket. Some Babylonians argued
that the slave deserved the burning iron for being a thief, others, more magnanimous, that the executioner
should employ the iron because thus fate had decreed. There were disturbances, there were regrettable
instances of bloodshed, but the masses of Babylon at last, over the opposition of the well-to-do, imposed
their will; they saw their generous objectives fully achieved. First, the Company was forced to assume all
public power. (The unification was necessary because of the vastness and complexity of the new operations.)
Second, the Lottery was made secret, free of charge, and open to all. The mercenary sale of lots was
abolished; once initiated into the mysteries of Baal, every free man automatically took part in the sacred
drawings, which were held in the labyrinths of the god every sixty nights and determined each man's destiny
until the next drawing. The consequences were incalculable. A lucky draw might bring about a man's elevation
to the council of the magi or the imprisonment of his enemy (secret, or known by all to be so), or might allow
him to find, in the peaceful dimness of his room, the woman who would begin to disturb him, or whom he had
never hoped to see again; an unlucky draw: mutilation, dishonor of many kinds, death itself. Sometimes a
single event--the murder of C in a tavern, B's mysterious apotheosis--would be the inspired outcome of thirty
or forty drawings. Combining bets was difficult, but we must recall that the individuals of the Company were
(and still are) all--powerful, and clever. In many cases, the knowledge that certain happy turns were the
simple result of chance would have lessened the force of those outcomes; to forestall that problem, agents of
the Company employed suggestion, or even magic. The paths they followed, the intrigues they wove, were
invariably secret. To penetrate the innermost hopes and innermost fears of every man, they called upon
astrologers and spies. There were certain stone lions, a sacred latrine called Qaphqa, some cracks in a dusty
aqueduct--these places, it was generally believed, gave access to the Company, and well- or ill-wishing
persons would deposit confidential reports in them. An alphabetical file held those dossiers of varying
veracity.

Incredibly, there was talk of favoritism, of corruption. With its customary discretion, the Company did not
reply directly; instead, it scrawled its brief argument in the rubble of a mask factory. This apologia is now
numbered among the sacred Scriptures. It pointed out, doctrinally, that the Lottery is an interpolation of
chance into the order of the universe, and observed that to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not
contravene it. It also noted that those lions, that sacred squatting-place, though not disavowed by the
Company (which reserved the right to consult them), functioned with no official guarantee.

This statement quieted the public's concerns. But it also produced other effects perhaps unforeseen by its
author. It profoundly altered both the spirit and the operations of the Company. I have but little time
remaining; we are told that the ship is about to sail--but I will try to explain.

However unlikely it may seem, no one, until that time, had attempted to produce a general theory of gaming.
Babylonians are not a speculative people; they obey the dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their
hopes, their nameless terror to it, but it never occurs to them to delve into its labyrinthine laws or the
revolving spheres that manifest its workings. Nonetheless, the semiofficial statement that I mentioned
inspired numerous debates of a legal and mathematical nature. From one of them, there emerged the following
conjecture: If the Lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, then
is it not appropriate that chance intervene in every aspect of the drawing, not just one? Is it not ludicrous
that chance should dictate a person's death while the circumstances of that death--whether private or public,
whether drawn out for an hour or a century--should not be subject to chance? Those perfectly reasonable
objections finally prompted sweeping reform; the complexities of the new system (complicated further by its
having been in practice for centuries) are understood by only a handful of specialists, though I will attempt
to summarize them, even if only symbolically.

Let us imagine a first drawing, which condemns a man to death. In pursuance of that decree, another drawing is
held; out of that second drawing come, say, nine possible executors. Of those nine, four might initiate a
third drawing to determine the name of the executioner, two might replace the unlucky draw with a lucky one
(the discovery of a treasure, say), another might decide that the death should be exacerbated (death with
dishonor, that is, or with the refinement of torture), others might simply refuse to carry out the
sentenceÖ. That is the scheme of the Lottery, put symbolically. In reality, the number of drawings is
infinite. No decision is final; all branch into others. The ignorant assume that infinite drawings require
infinite time; actually, all that is required is that time be infinitely subdivisible, as in the famous
parable of the Race with the Tortoise. That infinitude coincides remarkably well with the sinuous numbers of
Chance and with the Heavenly Archetype of the Lottery beloved of Platonists. Some distorted echo of our custom
seems to have reached the Tiber: In his Life of Antoninus Heliogabalus, Aelius Lampridius tells us that the
emperor wrote out on seashells the fate that he intended for his guests at dinner--some would receive ten
pounds of gold; others, ten houseflies, ten dormice, ten bears. It is fair to recall that Heliogabalus was
raised in Asia Minor, among the priests of his eponymous god.

There are also impersonal drawings, whose purpose is unclear. One drawing decrees that a sapphire from
Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a bird be released from the top of a
certain tower; another, that every hundred years a grain of sand be added to (or taken from) the countless
grains of sand on a certain beach. Sometimes, the consequences are terrible.

Under the Company's beneficent influence, our customs are now steeped in chance. The purchaser of a dozen
amphorae of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one contains a talisman, or a viper; the scribe who writes
out a contract never fails to include some error; I myself, in this hurried statement, have misrepresented
some splendor, some atrocity perhaps, too, some mysterious monotony.... Our historians, the most perspicacious
on the planet, have invented a method for correcting chance; it is well known that the outcomes of this method
are (in general) trust-worthy--although, of course, they are never divulged without a measure of deception.
Besides, there is nothing so tainted with fiction as the history of the Company.... A paleographic document,
unearthed at a certain temple, may come from yesterday's drawing or from a drawing that took place centuries
ago. No book is published without some discrepancy between each of the edition's copies. Scribes take a secret
oath to omit, interpolate, alter. Indirect falsehood is also practiced.

The Company, with godlike modesty, shuns all publicity. Its agents, of course, are secret; the orders it
constantly (perhaps continually) imparts are no different from those spread wholesale by impostors.
Besides--who will boast of being a mere impostor? The drunken man who blurts out an absurd command, the
sleeping man who suddenly awakes and turns and chokes to death the woman sleeping at his side--are they not,
perhaps, implementing one of the Company's secret decisions? That silent functioning, like God's, inspires all
manner of conjectures. One scurrilously suggests that the Company ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and
that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional; another believes that the Company is
eternal, and teaches that it shall endure until the last night, when the last god shall annihilate the earth.
Yet another declares that the Company is omnipotent, but affects only small things: the cry of a bird, the
shades of rust and dust, the half dreams that come at dawn. Another, whispered by masked heresiarchs, says
that the Company has never existed, and never will. Another, no less despicable, argues that it makes no
difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing
but an infinite game of chance