Rituals In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.” (142)

Rituals have been a part of human society since the first families huddled together. The intention of repeating the activity is to remind the group of members that something is important and vital to the fabric of their lives. This one sentence really exemplifies how society fails to learn and understand why they repeat a pattern of behavior. In the story, one generation after another neglected to take care of the “paraphernalia” (138), of the lottery and as the years passed “the ritual had been allowed to lapse.”(138) It also appears that over time the reasoning behind the annual gathering of the villagers was