Jorge Luis Borges
The Babylon Lottery
Like all men in Babylon I have been
a proconsul;
like all, a slave; I have also known
omnipotence,
opprobrium, jail. Look: the index finger
of my right hand is missing. Look again:
through this rent in my cape you can
see
a ruddy tatoo on my belly. It is the
second
symbol, Beth. This letter, on nights
of full
moon, gives me power over men whose
mark
is Ghimel; but it also subordinates
me to
those marked Aleph, who on moonless
nights
owe obedience to those marked Ghimel.
In
a cellar at dawn, I have severed the
jugular
vein of sacred bulls against a black
rock.
During one lunar year, I have been
declared
invisible: I shrieked and was not heard,
I stole my bread and was not decapitated.
I have known what the Greeks did not:
uncertainty.
In a bronze chamber, faced with the
silent
handkerchief of a strangler, hope has
been
faithful to me; in the river of delights,
panic has not failed me. Heraclitus
of Pontica
admiringly relates that Pythagoras
recalled
having been Pyrrho, and before that
Euphorbus,
and before that some other mortal.
In order
to recall analogous vicissitudes I
do not
need to have recourse to death, nor
even
to imposture.
I owe this almost atrocious variety
to an
institution which other republics know
nothing
about, or which operates among them
imperfectly
and in secret: the lottery. I have
not delved
into its history; I do know that the
wizards
have been unable to come to any agreement;
of its powerful designs I know what
a man
not versed in astrology might know
of the
moon. I come from a vertiginous country
where
the lottery forms a principal part
of reality:
until this very day I have thought
about
all this as little as I have about
the behavior
of the indecipherable gods or about
the beating
of my own heart. Now, far from Babylon
and
its beloved customs, I think of the
lottery
with some astonishment and ponder the
blasphemous
conjectures murmured by men in the
shadows
at twilight.
My father related that anciently -
a matter
of centuries; of years? - the lottery
in
Babylon was a game of plebeian character.
He said (I do not know with what degree
of
truth) that barbers gave rectangular
bits
of bone or decorated parchment in exchange
for copper coins. A drawing of the
lottery
was held in the middle of the day:
the winners
received, without further corroboration
from
chance, silverminted coins. The procedure,
as you see, was elemental.
Naturally, these "lotteries"
failed.
Their moral virtue was nil. They did
not
appeal to all the faculties of men:
only
to their hope. In the face of public
indifference,
the merchants who established these
venal
lotteries began to lose money. Someone
attempted
to introduce a slight reform: the interpolation
of a certain small number of adverse
outcomes
among the favored numbers. By means
of this
reform, the purchasers of numbered
rectangles
stood the double chance of winning
a sum
or of paying a fine often considerable
in
size. This slight danger - for each
thirty
favored numbers there would be one
adverse
number - awoke, as was only natural,
the
public's interest. The Babylonians
gave themselves
up to the game. Anyone who did not
acquire
lots was looked upon as pusillanimous,
mean-spirited.
In time, this disdain multiplied. The
person
who did not play was despised, but
the losers
who paid the fine were also scorned.
The
Company (thus it began to be known
at that
time) was forced to take measures to
protect
the winners, who could not collect
their
prizes unless nearly the entire amount
of
the fines was already collected. The
Company
brought suit against the losers: the
judge
condemned them to pay the original
fine plus
costs or to spend a number of days
in jail.
Every loser chose jail, so as to defraud
the Company. It was from this initial
bravado
of a few men that the all-powerful
position
of the Company - its ecclesiastical,
metaphysical
strength - was derived.
A short while later, the reports on
the drawings
omitted any enumeration of fines and
limited
themselves to publishing the jail sentences
corresponding to each adverse number.
This
laconism, almost unnoticed at the time,
became
of capital importance. It constituted
the
first appearance in the lottery of
non-pecuniary
elements. Its success was great. Pushed
to
such a measure by the players, the
Company
found itself forced to increase its
adverse
numbers.
No one can deny that the people of
Babylonia
are highly devoted to logic, even to
symmetry.
It struck them as incoherent that the
fortunate
numbers should be computed in round
figures
of money while the unfortunate should
be
figured in terms of days and nights
in jail.
Some moralists argued that the possession
of money does not determine happiness
and
that other forms of fortune are perhaps
more
immediate.
There was another source of restlessness
in the lower depths. The members of
the sacerdotal
college multiplied the stakes and plumbed
the vicissitudes of terror and hope;
the
poor, with reasonable or inevitable
envy,
saw themselves excluded from this notoriously
delicious exhiliration. The just anxiety
of all, poor and rich alike, to participate
equally is the lottery, inspired an
indignant
agitation, the memory of which the
years
have not erased. Certain obstinate
souls
did not comprehend, or pretended not
to comprehend,
that a new order had come, a necessary
historical
stage . . . A slave stole a crimson
ticket,
a ticket which earned him the right
to have
his tongue burned in the next drawing.
The
criminal code fixed the same penalty
for
the theft of a ticket. A number of
Babylonians
argued that he deserved a red-hot poker
by
virtue of the theft; others, more magnanimous,
held that the public executioner should
apply
the penalty of the lottery, since chance
had so determined . . .
Disturbances broke out, there was a
lamentable
shedding of blood; but the people of
Babylon
imposed their will at last, over the
opposition
of the rich. That is: the people fully
achieved
their magnanimous ends. In the first
place,
it made the Company accept complete
public
power. (This unification was necessary,
given
the vastness and complexity of the
new operations.)
In the second place, it forced the
lottery
to be secret, free, and general. The
sale
of tickets for money was abolished.
Once
initiated into the mysteries of Bel,
every
free man automatically participated
in the
sacred drawings of lots, which were
carried
out in the labyrinths of the gods every
seventy
nights and which determined every man's
fate
until the next exercise. The consequences
were incalculable. A happy drawing
might
motivate his elevation to the council
of
wizards or his condemnation to the
custody
of an enemy (notorious or intimate),
or to
find, in the peaceful shadows of a
room,
the woman who had begun to disquiet
him or
whom he had never expected to see again.
An adverse drawing might mean mutilation,
a varied infamy, death. Sometimes a
single
event - the tavern killing of C, the
mysterious
glorification of B - might be the brilliant
result of thirty or forty drawings.
But it
must be recalled that the individuals
of
the Company were (and are) all-powerful
and
astute as well. In many cases, the
knowledge
that certain joys were the simple doing
of
chance might have detracted from their
exellence;
to avoid this inconvenience the Company's
agents made use of suggestion and magic.
Their moves, their management, were
secret.
In the investigation of people's intimate
hopes and intimate terrors, they made
use
of astrologers and spies. There were
certain
stone lions, there was a sacred privy
called
Qaphqa, there were fissures in a dusty
aqueduct
which, according to general opinion,
lead
to the Company; malign or benevolent
people
deposited accusations in these cracks.
These
denunciations were incorporated into
an alphabetical
archive of variable veracity.
Incredibly enough, there were still
complaints.
The Company, with its habitual discretion,
did not reply directly. It preferred
to scribble
a brief argument - which now figures
among
sacred scriptures - in the debris of
a mask
factory. That doctrinal piece of literature
observed that the lottery is an interpolation
of chance into the order of the world
and
that to accept errors is not to contradict
fate but merely to corroborate it.
It also
observed that those lions and that
sacred
recipient, though not unauthorized
by the
Company (which did not renounce the
right
to consult them), functioned without
official
guaranty.
This declaration pacified the public
unease.
It also produced other effects, not
foreseen
by the author. It deeply modified the
spirit
and operations of the Company. (I have
little
time left to tell what I know; we have
been
warned that the ship is ready to sail;
but
I will attempt to explain it.)
Improbable as it may be, no one had
until
then attempted to set up a general
theory
of games. A Babylonian is not highly
speculative.
He reveres the judgments of fate, he
hands
his life over to them, he places his
hopes,
his panic terror in them, but it never
occurs
to him to investigate their labyrinthian
laws nor the giratory spheres which
disclose
them. Nevertheless, the unofficial
declaration
which I have mentioned inspired many
discussions
of a juridico-mathematical nature.
From one
of these discussions was born the following
conjecture: if the lottery is an intensification
of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos
into
the cosmos, would it not be desirable
for
chance to intervene at all stages of
the
lottery and not merely in the drawing?
Is
it not ridiculous for chance to dictate
the
death of someone, while the circumstances
of his death-its silent reserve or
publicity,
the time limit of one hour or one centuryshould
remain immune to hazard? These eminently
just scruples finally provoked a considerable
reform, whose complexities (intensified
by
the practice of centuries) are not
understood
except by a handful of specialists,
but which
I will attempt to summarize, even if
only
in a symbolic manner.
Let us imagine a first drawing, which
eventuates
in a sentence of death against some
individual.
To carry out the sentence, another
drawing
is set up, and this drawing proposes
(let
us say) nine possible executioners.
Of these
executioners, four can initiate a third
drawing
which will reveal the name of the actual
executioner, two others can replace
the adverse
order with a fortunate order (the finding
of a treasure, let us say), another
may exacerbate
the death sentence (that is: make it
infamous
or enrich it with torture), still others
may refuse to carry it out . . .
Such is the symbolic scheme. In reality,
the number of drawings is infinite.
No decision
is final, all diverge into others.
The ignorant
suppose that an infinite number of
drawings
require an infinite amount of time;
in reality,
it is quite enough that time be infinitely
subdivisible, as is the case in the
famous
parable of the Tortoise and the Hare.
This
infinitude harmonizes in an admirable
manner
with the sinuous numbers of Chance
and of
the Celestial Archetype of the Lottery
adored
by the Platonists . . .
A certain distorted echo of our ritual
seems
to have resounded along the Tiber:
Aelius
Lampridius, in his Life of Antoninus
Heliogabalus,
tells of how this emperor wrote down
the
lot of his guests on seashells, so
that one
would receive ten pounds of gold and
another
ten flies, ten dormice, ten bears.
It is
only right to remark that Heliogabalus
was
educated in Asia Minor, among the priests
of the eponymous god.
There are also impersonal drawings,
of undefined
purpose: one drawing will decree that
a sapphire
from Taprobane be thrown into the waters
of the Euphrates; another, that a bird
be
released from a tower roof; another,
that
a grain of sand be withdrawn (or added)
to
the innumerable grains on a beach.
The consequences,
sometimes, are terrifying.
Under the beneficent influence of the
Company,
our customs have become thoroughly
impregnated
with chance. The buyer of a dozen amphoras
of Damascus wine will not be surprised
if
one of them contains a talisman or
a viper.
The scribe who draws up a contract
scarcely
ever fails to introduce some erroneous
datum;
I myself, in making this hasty declaration,
have falsified or invented some grandeur,
some atrocity; perhaps, too, a certain
mysterious
monotony . . .
Our historians, the most discerning
in the
world, have invented a method for correcting
chance. It is well known that the operations
of this method are (in general) trustworthy;
although, naturally, they are not divulged
without a measure of deceit. In any
case,
there is nothing so contaminated with
fiction
as the history of the Company . . .
A paleographic document, unearthed
in a temple,
may well be the work of yesterday's
drawing
or that of one lasting a century. No
book
is ever published without some variant
in
each copy. Scribes take a secret oath
to
omit, interpolate, vary.
The Company, with divine modesty, eludes
all publicity. Its agents, as is only
natural,
are secret. The orders which it is
continually
sending out do not differ from those
lavishly
issued by imposters. Besides, who can
ever
boast of being a mere imposter? The
inebriate
who improvises an absurd mandate, the
dreamer
who suddenly awakes to choke the woman
who
lies at his side to death, do they
not both,
perhaps, carry out a secret decision
by the
Company? This silent functioning, comparable
to that of God, gives rise to all manner
of conjectures. One of them, for instance,
abominably insinuates that the Company
is
eternal and that it will last until
the last
night of the world, when the last god
annihilates
the cosmos. Still another conjecture
declares
that the Company is omnipotent, but
that
it exerts its influence only in the
most
minute matters: in a bird's cry, in
the shades
of rust and the hues of dust, in the
cat
naps of dawn. There is one conjecture,
spoken
from the mouths of masked heresiarchs,
to
the effect that the Company has never
existed
and never will. A conjecture no less
vile
argues that it is indifferently inconsequential
to affirm or deny the reality of the
shadowy
corporation, because Babylon is nothing
but
an infinite game of chance.
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