Chapter 6 babylon lottery

Like all Babylonians, I have been a governor; like all men, I have been a slave; I have been supreme, I have been humiliated, and I have been in prison.And voila: the index finger of my right hand has been chopped off.Look: through the tear in my robe I can see an orange tattoo: that's the second symbol, Beth.On nights when the moon is full, this letter gives me dominion over those who bear the mark of Kimmel, but I obey those who bear the mark of Aleph, and they obey the man who bears the mark of Kimmel on moonless nights.At dawn I strangled the holy cow in front of a black rock in the cellar.In one lunar year, I was declared invisible: I shouted loudly but no one answered, I stole bread but was not caught and beheaded.I experienced something the Greeks didn't understand: fear.It was a secret room of bronze, facing the silent hooded hangman, hope was always with me; but in the river of joy there was panic.Heraclides Pontukus said with admiration that Pythagoras remembered that he was Palo, Euphorbo, and another in his previous life; Reincarnation is required, not even fake deception.

I owe my extraordinary variety to one institution, unknown to other republics, or imperfect and undisclosed, the lottery.I have not investigated the history of the lottery; I know that wizards disagree on the matter; I know from the powerful intentions of the lottery what a man who does not understand astrology understands when he observes the moon.The lottery is an important part of the reality of my country's bewildering complexity: to this day I give as little thought to the lottery as to the inscrutable deeds of the gods and the vagaries of my own mind.Now, far from Babylon and its dear customs, I think with some amazement of the lottery and the blasphemous mutterings of late-nighters.

My father said, Once upon a time—Centuries or years ago? ——Babylon's lottery is a gamble of a civilian nature.He says (I don't know if it's true) that barbers sold lottery tickets, received copper coins, and gave oblongs of bone or parchment with symbols painted on them.Lottery draw in broad daylight: those who win the lottery will receive silver coins with their tickets.Obviously, the procedure is very simple. Naturally, that "lottery" lost.It has no spiritual character.No consideration is given to human ingenuity, except for the hope directed at man.Faced with an unresponsive public, the businessmen who started that lottery started losing money.Someone tried to reform: insert a few outdated numbers into the lottery numbers.With this change, lottery ticket buyers have a double risk of winning a sum of money or paying a potentially large fine.For every thirty lucky numbers paired with one unlucky number, this small risk naturally aroused public interest.The Babylonians took part.Those who don't win the lottery are considered cowardly and inferior.Later this not unreasonable contempt was intensified.People who do not play the lottery are of course looked down upon, and losers who buy lottery tickets and are fined are also looked down upon.The reputation of the lottery company has grown, and it begins to worry about the interests of the winners, because if the fines cannot be basically collected, the winners will not receive the prize money.Companies sue the losers: Judges order them to pay fines and legal costs, or the equivalent of days in jail.In order to let the company fail, the defendants chose to go to prison.Due to the stubbornness of a few, the corporation has acquired an ecclesiastical and metaphysical character, and gained supreme power.

Not long after, the announcement of the lottery announced the amount of fines only to say the number of days in prison for each unlucky number.This simplification, which went unnoticed at the time, was of great importance.That was the first time a non-monetary factor appeared in the lottery industry.It works like never before.Under repeated demands from gamblers, the company had to increase the number of unlucky numbers. Everyone knows that the Babylonians were obsessed with logic and even symmetry.It is unreasonable that the auspicious number is paid with ringing coins, and the unlucky number is converted into days and nights in the prison.Some moralists believe that the possession of coins is not necessarily a sign of happiness, and that other forms of luck may be more direct.

There was unrest in the slums.Members of the clergy doubled down on the stakes, relishing the vicissitudes of terror and hope; the paupers (with inevitable, understandable jealousy) felt excluded from this particularly pleasant transformation.The legitimate desire that all people, rich or poor, should have an equal right to participate in the lottery gave rise to an outcry of indignation so powerful that it is still vividly remembered years later.Some die-hards don't understand (or pretend not to understand) that this is a new order, an inevitable phase of history... A slave stole a pink lottery ticket, and the lottery resulted in branding for the bearer .It so happens that the code prescribes the same penalty for the theft of bills.Some Babylonians reasoned that, as a thief, a red-hot iron was a just punishment; others were more lenient, advocating that the tongue be branded for the executioner's body, because it was Providence....There was turmoil and tragic bloodshed ; but despite the objections of the rich, the purpose of the common people of Babylon was at last accomplished.The generous demands of the people have been fully met.First, corporations are forced to acknowledge public power. (Considering the extensiveness and complexity of the new method of issuing lottery tickets, it is still necessary for the company to manage them in a unified manner.) Secondly, the lottery ticket has been changed to secret, free and universal distribution.The method of selling for a fee shall be abolished.The free man has learned Bell's secret, and automatically participates in the sacred lottery ceremony, which is held every sixty nights in the God's Labyrinth to determine the fate of people before the next lottery.The consequences are immeasurable.An auspicious lottery can be promoted to the wizarding council, or an open or secret enemy can be thrown into prison, or a woman can be found in a dark and quiet room that fascinates us, or we didn't expect to see again; Mutilated, ruined, and killed.Sometimes there is only one wonderful ending among the thirty or forty lots-some C is killed in the hotel, and some B is mysteriously worshiped as a god.Cheating is hard; but remember that the guys in the company were and are cunning and omnipotent.In most cases the charm of happiness is lessened by the knowledge that some happiness is but chance; and to avoid this evil the agents of the firm resort to suggestion and sorcery.Their steps and methods are kept secret.They hired astrologers and spies to investigate everyone's inner hopes and fears.There are a few stone lions, a holy latrine called Gafgar, a dusty stone aqueduct with a few crevices that are generally believed to be reserved for the company; people, malicious or well-meaning, place informative material in those places .Alphabetical archives collect this information with varying degrees of reliability.

Unbelievably, there was a lot of talk behind the scenes.The company has always been cautious in dealing with things and did not answer directly.It scribbled a terse passage in an abandoned mask-making factory that is now included in the Bible.This passage points out that the lottery is a contingency inserted into the world order, and admitting mistakes is not to refute contingency, but to confirm it.It is also pointed out that those stone lions and holy vessels, although not disavowed by the company (the company does not waive the right of reference), their role is not officially guaranteed.

The statement calmed public unease.But it also had unexpected effects.It profoundly changed the ethos and activities of the company.I have little time left; we have been informed of the imminent departure of the ship; I will explain as well as I can. Hard as it sounds, no one had explored a general theory of gambling until then.Babylonians are not speculators by nature.They respected the decisions of chance, offering up their lives, their hopes, and their horrors, but it never occurred to them to investigate its bewildering laws and the rotating stars that revealed them.Yet the high-sounding statement I mentioned has given rise to much discussion of a jurisprudential and mathematical nature.One of them produced the following hypothesis: Since the lottery is the intensification of chance, causing periodic chaos in the universe, wouldn't it be better to let chance participate in the whole process of the lottery, and not only in a certain stage?Isn't it absurd that chance can determine someone's death, and the conditions of death--secret or public, for an hour or a century--are not determined by chance?These legitimate skepticisms eventually led to major reforms, centuries of implementation adding to its complexity only experts can understand, but I try to summarize a few points, even if symbolically.

We imagine the first drawing of lots to determine a person's death sentence.A second drawing of lots determines the execution, for example, of nine possible executioners.Among the nine executors, four draw lots for the third time to decide who the executioner is, two can replace the ominous one with auspicious ones (for example, discover a hidden treasure), and one can strengthen the degree of execution ( That is to say, execution by lingering death or burning the body and ashes), and the rest can be refused to execute... This is a symbolic outline.In fact, the number of draws is infinite.No decision is final, and other decisions can be derived from the decision.The ignorant think that an infinite drawing of lots requires infinite time; it is not so, as long as time is subdivided infinitely, as the famous parable of the tortoise race says.This notion of infinity fits well with the intricacies of chance and the perfect model of the lottery, so beloved of the purists... Our Babylonian conventions seem to have distorted echoes in the Tiber; According to the Biography of Antonino Heriogabalo, the emperor distributed shells with good luck and fortune to the guests during the banquet, and some people could receive ten pounds of gold, ten flies, and ten dormouse. , or ten bears.One can't help but recall that Heriogabalo was educated by totem-spirited wizards in Asia Minor.

There are also signed documents that do not target specific people and have unclear purposes: for example, throwing a piece of sapphire from Ceylon into the Euphrates River, releasing a bird on the top of the tower, and taking it away from the beach with countless sand grains every 100 years ( or plus) a grain of sand and so on.Sometimes the consequences of such signings are dire. Under the influence of corporate boons, our customs are full of chance.A customer who buys twelve jars of Damascus wine is not surprised to find that one of them contains an amulet or a viper; hardly once does the scribe who draws up the deed fail to insert a wrong data; There are also some exaggerations and distortions in the written things.There may be some mystifying monotony.... We Babylonian historians, the most perceptive in the world, have invented a method of correcting for chance, which is known to be generally sound in its application; Throw in a little deception.In addition, the history of the company has the largest fictional component... A document written in ancient characters unearthed from the temple ruins may be yesterday, or it may be a record of a lottery hundreds of years ago.There are discrepancies between each edition of books.The scribe's oath must be abridged, added, falsified.Insinuations are also employed.

Lottery companies are careful to avoid all ostentation.Its agents are, of course, secretive: the corporate stream of orders is no different from the stream of swindlers.Besides, who can call himself a simple liar?The drunk man gave absurd orders on a whim.The dreamer suddenly woke up and strangled his wife who was sleeping next to him. Aren't they carrying out the company's secret instructions?This silent operation can be compared with the will of God and invites all kinds of speculation.There is speculation that viciously implies that corporations have disappeared for hundreds of years, and that the divine chaos in our lives is purely heredity and tradition; another conjectures that corporations are eternal, claiming that they will last until the last God wipes out the world last night.There is also speculation that the corporation is omnipotent, but meddling in trivial matters: the song of birds, the color of rust and dust, the confusion of dawn, and so on.There is another kind of speculation that the company did not have it before and will not have it in the future through the mouth of the heretical founder.There is also an equally vile statement that it does not matter whether to affirm or deny the existence of that shadowy company, since Babylon is nothing but an infinite gamble.