In the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, people in a village are required to attend a lottery every year. However, instead of earning money, the winner of the lottery is stoned by the villagers until they die. The reason for this lottery is unknown, as nobody seems to remember the true reason for the lottery. However, after analyzing the text, one can reason that the lottery is held is to make a sacrifice to Mother Nature.
Some evidence that the lottery is meant to be a sacrifice of some sort is based off the insistence of tradition. The lottery must be held annually, and always starts on the 27th of June, for no specified reason. Another thing is the Black Box. The Black Box has only been replaced only once, over maybe centuries of use, because the townspeople were nervous to disrupt tradition, even in just the black box. The townspeople take it even further by rebuilding the black box with pieces of the original. This could mean that the black box used to hold a special meaning to the townspeople, which again leads to the idea of a ritual.
However, maybe the most prominent piece of evidence in the text is when Old Man Warner says: “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.‘“ While this could be meant just to show that the lottery’s importance, but again, this saying might mean that because we hold a lottery in June, we will get a good harvest of corn. This is further strengthened that corn is harvested in the fall, and that June is when the corn is first starting to come out of the ground and grow outwards, and is when corn is the most vulnerable to pests and drought.
Because of the idea that a tradition that was long forgotten must be upheld, and the old saying of “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” One can reasonably conclude that the purpose of the lottery is to sacrifice to Mother Nature or some kind of deity to insure a good harvest in the fall.