In Happened we usually focus on the past — I mean, note the past tense of the title and all. But January 11 is a good day to put a different spin on that, because one of the things that happened on this day in the deep past — back in Roman times, in fact — was Carmentalia. It was a festival of the goddess Carmenta, and it was all about both the past and the future. Carmenta, you see, had two sisters who acted as her attendants: Postvorta and Antevorta. Postvorta was the personification of the past, and Antevorta represented the future.

One of Carmenta’s powers was prophecy, and the festival, as far as we know, included songs about the past and what was yet to come. But the goddess also represented childbirth, and Postvorta and Antevorta also represented births where babies were born head first (that was Postvorta) and feet first (Antevorta’s area).

Nowadays not much is remembered about Carmeta, her attendants, her acolytes, or Carmentalia, her festival. Plutarch, who was actually a Greek philosopher and writer, became a Roman citizen and among other things, wrote about Roman culture. He noted that Carmenta was worshipped by the women of Rome more than any of the other gods. Part of that reverence probably had to do with Carmenta’s association with childbirth. In those days, even in civilized Rome, a baby had only about a 30% chance of living to be an adult. So childbirth — and foretelling what was likely to happen — was something that probably occupied a lot of expectant mothers’ minds. It still does today, I think — and not just expectant mothers. Reflecting on the past, at least our own personal pasts, and considering what the future might have in store might be among the things that all of us have in common.

Queen Elizabeth II hasn’t been around quite that long.

So let’s have a look at some of the other things January 11 has had for us, and what those things might suggest. One activity that pretty obviously involves foretelling — or wishing very hard that we could see the future — is gambling. Lotteries, for instance. And wouldn’t you know it, January 11 in 1569 was the day that Queen Elizabeth I (that’s the previous one; the current Queen Elizabeth is the second, and hasn’t been around quite as long as that) picked the winner in the very first lottery in that country. There are records of lotteries before that, of course — even back to 205 BCE in China. But for a lottery that still has pretty detailed records, January 11, 1569 is the best choice. Besides, look, it happened on January 11.

The 1569 lottery included some pretty good predictions. If you bought a ticket, you knew whether you were going to win a prize. Because ALL the tickets were winners. The prizes might be money, or you might get some sort of commodity like silver or linen, which had significant value. In fact, the prizes amounted to the total amount of money garnered by ticket sales. It worked because the lottery lasted for three years, during which the government received, in effect, an interest-free loan. There was an additional benefit that came with a ticket. It sounds odd today, but every ticket holder received immunity from one arrest, with the exceptions of piracy, murder, treason, or felonies — and “felonies” used to be a much more limited category than now.

In effect, if you bought a ticket you were not only guaranteed a prize, but your ticket was also a get out of jail free card (in fact that very lottery may be behind the idea of the “get out of jail free card” used in board games like Monopoly). So why not just buy one, if not more? Because most people couldn’t afford one. In fact the tickets weren’t easy to sell. The government made a side deal by selling the sales rights to brokers, who in turn hired individual salesmen. Anyway, the brokers and their agents recognized that the tickets were too expensive for most people, so they started selling shares of a single ticket. You could, for example, buy a sixteenth of a lottery ticket and receive that proportion of the prize. If that sounds slightly familiar, maybe it’s because later on, those same brokers turned to selling other things, like shares in companies. That’s right, we have stockbrokers because of lottery tickets. (I’m not quite sure whether that means our ticket was a winner or a loser.)

Life insurance is, in a sense, a form of gambling.

But speaking of gambling, guess what else began on January 11? it was the day 1759 that the first US (well, “North American” at that point; the US didn’t exist) life insurance company was formed. It was officially the “Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of the Presbyterian Ministers.” It’s still going today, although thanks to mergers, acquisitions, and the modern penchant for short, pithy, and essentially meaningless company names, it’s now called “Unum.” Life insurance is, in a sense, a form of gambling. A policy holder is somewhat perversely betting that the insured person is going to die before the policy expires. At the same time, the insurance company is betting that they won’t, or at least they’ll stay alive long enough for the collected premium payments to total more than the policy pays out. Now, clearly the insurance company assumes that if you hold an insurance policy on somebody’s life, you care about the person more than you care about the money. Except guess what — they didn’t think of that right away. It was once possible to take out a life insurance policy on any old chap, even if you didn’t know them, or care what happened to them. The companies did learn, though. I think it only took a few murders of insured people by policy holders to get the insurance folks very interested in the relationship between the two.

This has nothing to do with January 11, but just by the way, there was once another form of life insurance policy called a “tontine.” That was a group purchase, where some number of people pooled their money to buy a policy. The last one of the group alive collected the money. There are other types of tontine policies that are more about providing retirement income, and those are still available in some places. But the pure life-insurance last-survivor-wins version didn’t, as far as I know, survive past just a few gunfights and secret plots.

There are some other areas of life in which you do well to consider the past, and what it can tell you about the future. Health, for example. If you smoke tobacco, you know (or should) that your future is more likely to present you with some health problems. At least you know that today. But before January 11, 1964, you probably didn’t. That was the day the US Surgeon General published the report Smoking and Health and established official support for the fact that tobacco smoking is really, seriously bad for you. If 1964 seems surprisingly recent for that information to have come to light, well, it probably is. Before that there is at least anecdotal evidence that some doctors actually recommended smoking as a way to improve health. Of course, at any given point the past and future of healthcare can present strangely divergent information. In various past health care systems, things that we know are detrimental, like bleeding, various poisons, not to mention smoking constituted advice, not warnings. It was January 11, 1922, for example, that injecting a person suffering from diabetes became a way to give them a better and longer future. That was the day Leonard Thompson of Toronto received the world’s first insulin injection. Diabetes at the time was a death sentence, but with regular injections, Thompson survived it for an additional 13 years.

When I started out talking about Carmenta being the goddess of childbirth and seeing both the past and the future, you might have found yourself muttering, “wait, what about Janus, that guy with two faces? Wasn’t he the Roman god of childbirth, not to mention January?” Bravo for your muttering, because Janus was the god of transitions, and he did have something to do with births — not to mention travel and trading. And yup, Janus is where we get “January.” It’s not very clear how Janus and Carmenta interacted, if they did at all. But they both had to do with the transition between past and future. And since that’s where we live all the time, we might as well raise a glass to both. Here’s to the past — and the future. Now, how am I going to figure out that winning lottery number…

Title quotes are from William Faulkner and Timbuk3