Exploring Cultural Rules and Beliefs in The Lottery

Customs or rituals changes across the world. Different part of the world has their own kind of different rules or belief. Not all the communities follow same kind of rituals but there are some similarities between their rituals or customs. Rituals like human sacrificing on the name of protecting society or for praising their god. Customs are meant to make life better for the people, but some communities followed them faithfully without any knowledge about its origin. The Lottery by author Shirley Jackson takes to a village, where people gathered together for a lottery and be a part of a murder of an innocent woman for no reason. People become so visionless following ancient traditions that they even not able to distinguish between good or bad.

The Lottery turned into a violent murder, where it seemed like a good story of people’s get together for an event. The plot of the story is so fascinating, author able to illustrate the image of the scene successfully. How all villagers come to the place leaving their all works and casually having talks with each other. Mr. Summers was appointed to take care of the process of this event. There were proper rules for lottery as well. Every family head must come forward and choose a slip from a funny black box. Then everyone can open their slip and whoever have the black dot on his or her slip will be the victim of stoning. The moment Tessie Hutchinson find the black dot on her slip, she lost her identity of a mother and innocent lady. Her friends, family members and neighbors all participated in the stoning and killed her. Every year villagers follow this ritual of lottery and murder an innocent human without any reason. They just following it blindly from a very long time without any proper information of its origin.

In the ancient Celtic region, there was a ritual performed by the druids to praise their lord by sacrificing innocent life of people burning them alive. They called this ritual Wicker Man. A movie named “The Wicker Man” staring Nicolas Cage also filmed on this ritual. According to the movie, to praise their goddess and to increase honey production on their island, they burned alive a person to death. They made a large statue in the shape of man with wooden sticks and place alive humans into it and burned them alive. This is how for the sake of rituals they horrendously murdered people by burning them alive. This happened for a very long time, which tells how people blindly follow such rituals without questioning their mind.

Relation between brother and sister is very sweet, there is always a bond of leadership, love and friendship. Brothers are expected to protect their sisters from every bad situation. Long time ago in Fiji, there was a ritual where brother required to strangle their widow sister. If the chief of the family died, his wife had to sacrifice her life too. Fijians had a firm belief that husband needs his wife afterlife as well. If a wife did not follow her husband afterlife his soul would not reach heaven. People tend to follow this ritual for a long time without even bothered themselves to question about this bizarre ritual where a woman had to strangle to death just because of her husband has died. And that too would be done by the hands of her own brother.

Communities adhere to their rituals or customs without having proper knowledge or origin about it. So many people became victim of these rituals for no reasons. Tessie Hutchinson who was an innocent lady, just because of a dot in her slip, she was murdered brutally by stoning. Not just adults, even children were not spared from such an evil ritual. Every year someone new will be chosen and murdered, no one is safe. Family, friend means nothing at the time of stoning the poor victim. Same the druids of Celtic brutally burned alive people, no matter those people have believe in their rituals or not. Innocent widow ladies strangled to death by her own brothers. These are the examples how people murdered for absurd reason. In the end, rituals and cultures were made to make life better for the followers, so that they live happily and close to their culture. Customs shouldn’t have been consisting of killing or sacrificing lives in the name of god. The Lottery, Wicker Man and strangle widow are the extreme examples of what can happen if the traditions are not questioned by the younger generation.