Sacrificial Ruals In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

Power of the Gods

For generation, human society is constantly changing throughout history and many of those changes are the extreme religious beliefs that many people practices. Such as “sacrificial rituals”. In “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson had written a novel about a small town that does sacrificial ritual once every year because they believe it would help the crops grow well in the summer. The process of this ritual is done by a random selection from a lottery box by each members of household and if a person draws a paper with a black dot on it, that person will be stone to death by the town folks. During the Iron Age, sacrificial rituals is commonly used around the countries such as Mexico, Egypt, China, and numerous of others countries and small tribes because they believe that it would please a divine being that is known to be alive. ‘Used to be saying about “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns.’ (312). This dangerous practice is an offering of food, objected, animals, blood, and even human sacrifice. Although this type of ritual practices is no longer use today, there were many countries than does “sacrificial rituals” in the past and the Inca empire is one of the many places that practice various of ancient ritual, one such as human sacrifice.

The Inca empire is one of the largest native empire during the sixteenth centuries that particularly practices human sacrifice because of their