ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
June 27
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"
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June
27th does not appear anywhere on the historical calendar of real-life occult
terror, and yet it may be the single most ominous date in American
literature—scarier, by the reckoning of more than one critic, than October 31st
itself. The reason has nothing to do with anything that genuinely happened on
this date and everything to do with a 1948 short story that begins, with
deceptive gentleness: “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the
fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and
the grass was richly green.” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” opens
like a postcard. It ends as one of the most quietly devastating depictions of
ritual violence ever published in a major American magazine.
When
The New Yorker printed it in June
1948, the response was unlike anything the magazine had experienced before or,
by most accounts, has experienced since. Jackson received more mail about “The
Lottery” than any other piece of fiction in the publication’s history—so much
that she had to upgrade her mailbox in the small Vermont town where she lived
to accommodate the volume. Of the roughly three hundred letters she received
that summer, she would later note, only thirteen had anything kind to say, and
most of those were from friends. Readers canceled subscriptions. Readers wrote
to ask, with apparent sincerity, where they could attend an actual lottery like
the one described. Jackson herself seemed genuinely startled by the intensity
of the reaction. “It had simply never occurred to me,” she wrote, “that these
people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write
me letters I was scared to open.”
A Timeless Horror
For
readers who have somehow avoided the widely anthologized text: a small, unnamed
American village gathers each June 27th in its square, between the post office
and the bank, for an annual civic ritual called the lottery. The atmosphere is
almost aggressively ordinary—children collecting stones, neighbors gossiping, a
battered black wooden box produced from storage, a list of household names read
aloud. Only in the story’s final pages does the actual nature of the lottery
reveal itself: the “winner,” drawn by chance from among the entire village, is
to be stoned to death by everyone present, including, in the story’s most
quietly horrifying detail, her own children, who are handed pebbles and folded
into the killing alongside the adults.
The unlucky woman’s name is Tessie Hutchinson. Whether Jackson intended any conscious echo of Anne Hutchinson—the Puritan dissenter banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 for the crime of claiming direct revelation from God, a woman this very column discussed only days ago—remains genuinely unclear, but the insinuation is certainly there. But the resonance is difficult to ignore. Both Hutchinsons are women whose New England communities decide, through entirely legal and procedurally correct means, that someone among them must absorb the community’s collective anxiety; both are subjected to a punishment the community insists is simply how things have always been done.
Jackson
did not invent the scapegoat mechanism driving her story; she borrowed it,
quite deliberately, from a specific and influential text. Her husband, the
literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, had brought home a copy of Sir James
Frazer’s monumental 1890 anthropological survey The Golden Bough, and Jackson absorbed
its central argument thoroughly: that an enormous range of human cultures,
across history and geography, have practiced ritual scapegoating—the periodic,
often violent removal of a single chosen individual believed to carry away the
accumulated sins, bad luck, or agricultural anxieties of the entire community.
Frazer documented fertility rites tied explicitly to the turning of the
agricultural year, ritual kings sacrificed to guarantee good harvests, and
propitiatory violence calendared with the same casual regularity as planting
and reaping.
This
is precisely the structure Jackson builds into her village. The lottery is
explicitly tied to the growing season—Old Man Warner, the story’s oldest and
most rigid defender of tradition, recites the old adage, “Lottery in June,
corn be heavy soon,” without a flicker of irony. The villagers gather at
the height of summer, at the same general turning of the agricultural calendar
that ancient fertility rites the world over have marked with sacrifice. June
27th, in Jackson’s story, functions exactly as the solstice season functioned
in the cultures Frazer documented: a hinge point in the year requiring blood to
keep the harvest, the village, the entire fragile social compact, properly
oiled.
The Witchcraft Hysteria Beneath the Surface
Frazer
was not Jackson’s only source of inspiration, and the second source runs even
closer to home for a publication concerned with American occult history.
Jackson had a long-standing, well-documented personal fascination with
witchcraft and magic—she would go on to write a popularized history of the
Salem witch trials, The Witchcraft of Salem Village, in 1956, and her
private library and correspondence reflect a genuine, sustained interest in
occult practice that extended well beyond simple literary curiosity. Scholars
examining “The Lottery” alongside the rest of Jackson’s 1949 collection, titled
The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris, have noted that nearly
every story in the volume makes what one critic calls a “slant” reference to
witchcraft, the demonic, or the ambiguously supernatural—never confirmed
outright, always hovering at the edge of plausible deniability, in a way that
mirrors how superstition and magical thinking actually persist in supposedly
rational modern communities: unspoken, unexamined, but never quite extinguished.
The Salem trials of 1692, in which an entire Massachusetts community turned with
terrible procedural seriousness against women identified, almost arbitrarily,
as the source of the community’s misfortune, provided Jackson with a historical
American template for exactly the mechanism Frazer had documented globally. New
England had already proven, on its own soil, within living cultural memory,
that an ordinary, pious, civically organized community could decide
collectively to kill one of its own members and call the killing virtuous.
Jackson set “The Lottery” in a village that could be any small American town
precisely because she understood that the Salem mechanism had never actually
disappeared—it had only stopped requiring an explicitly supernatural j.
But
Jackson was also writing in the direct aftermath of the World War II Germany, at a moment
when the entire civilized world was still attempting to comprehend how an
ordinary, educated, bureaucratically organized society had collectively
participated in industrialized mass murder—not through chaos or breakdown, but
through exactly the kind of orderly, procedurally correct civic ritual that
Jackson depicts in her village square. The villagers in “The Lottery” are not
monsters; they are neighbors. They make small talk, they worry about getting
home in time for lunch. This, more than any supernatural flourish, is what
unsettled 1948 readers to the point of writing letters Jackson was afraid to
open: the story insists that ordinary, decent people are entirely capable of ritualized
murder, provided the ritual is old enough, familiar enough, and sanctioned by
enough of the community simultaneously.
“The Lottery” has been anthologized so extensively—in literature textbooks, in horror collections, in academic surveys of American short fiction—that most readers encounter it already knowing the ending. (It also helps that so much modern media—from The Hunger Games to South Park—have drawn direct inspiration from it.) This has done nothing to dull its power. If anything, the foreknowledge sharpens the horror: knowing what June 27th holds for Tessie Hutchinson from the first paragraph, watching her walk calmly toward the square anyway, makes the story’s opening warmth—the blossoming flowers, the richly green grass, the children gathering their stones in such ordinary high spirits—feel less like dramatic irony and more like a documented historical pattern: this is simply how the ritual goes, every single year, regardless of who already knows how it ends.
Jackson
died in 1965, but the date she chose for her fictional village’s annual
sacrifice has, in its own quiet way, joined the genuine historical record this
column otherwise concerns itself with—not because anything supernatural
happened on June 27th, but because a story so thoroughly excavated the actual
mechanism of scapegoat ritual, witch panic, and communal violence that the date
itself now carries a documented cultural weight entirely independent of any
specific historical event.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
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By
Phil Hine | The Original Falcon Press
As
Alan Moore’s famously (and rhetorically) once asked, “Sure, you can invoke
[Lovecraftian entities]—but why would you want to?” Author Phil Hine addresses
this quite clearly in his opening disclaimer, sure to pique the interest of any
curious reader:
“It
is generally agreed by experienced magicians that working with the Cthulhu
Mythos is dangerous due to the high risk of obsession, personality
disintegration or infestation by parasitic shells.”
How
can we resist? Especially since Hine’s reasoning is equally logical: if Chaos
Magic can incorporate entities from the fictional world, shouldn’t there be a
comprehensive, serious study to, at least, instruct someone on the proper
methods and ethical concerns? Well, dear reader, here it is.
Long
out-of-print and back due to popular demand, The Pseudonomicon is a
slim, peculiar, deeply useful text that approaches H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional
cosmology not as horror literature but as a functioning magical system—although
the book could prove just as fascinating and useful to Lovecraft scholars,
since it takes the horror master’s worldbuilding serious enough to double as a
literary reference manual. But Hine’s core argument is elegant: the Great Old
Ones—Cthulhu, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep—occupy a unique mythic niche;
they are, as Lovecraft wrote, the entities that predate the ordered universe—beings
that exist outside the comfortable cosmological frameworks of other traditions.
They cannot be assimilated, and resist attribution. And in that
resistance, Hine claims, lies their genuine magical utility.
The
book moves through invocations of otherness, using dreamwork tied to well-known
Lovecraftian imagery (which fans will quickly recognize), and what Hine calls “purposive
disintegration”—a methodical use of Mythos-inflected gnosis. Here, the “Nightlands”
and “Dark Zones” sections offer ritual frameworks that are genuinely inventive,
drawing on Lovecraft’s dreamscapes with practical intent. Hine’s encounters
with the tradition give these pages a confessional heat absent from more
detached technical manuals.
But
a fair word of warning: much like Hine's Prime Chaos, this is not a beginner’s
text. The Pseudonomicon assumes familiarity with Chaos Magic methodology
and a certain psychological stability, since the currents being worked with
here are deliberately advanced. That said, Hine invites the reader to work the
material, observe results, and remain skeptical—even as something tentacled
presses against the window. Strange,
compact, and uniquely indispensable for those drawn to the weirder edges of the
tradition.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)
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