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Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:31:57 GMT
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Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky
From David Emery,
Paraskevidekatriaphobia: Fear of Friday the 13th
I just finished reading the abstract of a study published in the
British Medical Journal in 1993 entitled "Is Friday the 13th Bad for
behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United
Kingdom," its authors compared the ratio of traffic volume to the
number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th
and Friday the 13th, over a period of years.
Incredibly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently
fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number
of hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents was significantly
higher than on "normal" Fridays.
Their conclusion:
"Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a
result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52
percent. Staying at home is recommended."
Friday the 13th - The Most Widespread Superstition?
The sixth day of the week and the number 13 both have foreboding
reputations said to date from ancient times, and their inevitable
conjunction from one to three times a year portends more misfortune
than some credulous minds can bear. Some sources say it may be the
most widespread superstition in the United States. Some people won't
go to work on Friday the 13th; some won't eat in restaurants; many
wouldn't think of setting a wedding on the date.
Just how many Americans at the turn of the millennium still suffer
from this condition? According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a psychotherapist
specializing in the treatment of phobias (and coiner of the term
"paraskevidekatriaphobia"), the figure may be as high as 21 million.
If he's right, eight percent of Americans are still in the grips of a
very old superstition.
13: The Devil's Dozen
It is said: If 13 people sit down to dinner together, all will die
within the year. The Turks so disliked the number 13 that it was
practically expunged from their vocabulary (Brewer, 1894). Many cities
do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue. Many buildings don't have
a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the
devil's luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer,
Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters in their
names). There are 13 witches in a coven.
Though no one can say for sure when and why human beings first
associated the number 13 with misfortune, the belief is assumed to be
purporting to trace its origins to antiquity and beyond. It has been
proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the number 13 are as
ancient as the act of counting. Primitive man had only his 10 fingers
and two feet to represent units, this explanation goes, so he could
impenetrable mystery to our prehistoric forebears, hence an object of
superstition.
primitive man not have toes?
Despite whatever terrors the numerical unknown held for their
hunter-gatherer ancestors, ancient civilizations weren't unanimous in
their dread of 13. The Chinese regarded the number as lucky, some
commentators note, as did the Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs.
To the ancient Egyptians, these sources tell us, life was a quest for
13th beyond, thought to be the eternal afterlife. The number 13
glorious and desirable transformation. Though Egyptian civilization
perished, the symbolism conferred on the number 13 by its priesthood
survived, only to be corrupted by subsequent cultures who came to
associate 13 with a fear of death instead of a reverence for the
afterlife.
Anathema
Other sources speculate that the number 13 may have been purposely
vilified by the founders of patriarchal religions in the early days of
western civilization because it represented femininity. Thirteen had
been revered in prehistoric goddess-worshiping cultures, we are told,
because it corresponded to the number of lunar (menstrual) cycles in a
year (13 x 28 = 364 days). The "Earth Mother of Laussel," for example
figure holding a cresent-shaped horn bearing 13 notches. As the solar
calendar triumphed over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated
civilization, it is surmised, so did the number 12 over the number 13,
thereafter considered anathema.
On the other hand, one of the earliest concrete taboos associated with
Hindus, who believed, for reasons I haven't been able to ascertain,
at dinner. Interestingly enough, precisely the same superstition has
been attributed to the ancient Vikings (though I have also been told,
for what it's worth, that this and the accompanying mythographical
explanation are apocryphal). The story has been laid down as follows:
Loki, the Evil One
Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the Evil One,
god of mischief, had been left off the guest list but crashed the
party, bringing the total number of attendees to 13. True to
character, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind god of winter,
to attack Balder the Good, who was a favorite of the gods. Hod took a
spear of mistletoe offered by Loki and obediently hurled it at Balder,
killing him instantly. All Valhalla grieved. And although one might
take the moral of this story to be "Beware of uninvited guests bearing
mistletoe," the Norse themselves apparently concluded that 13 people
at a dinner party is just plain bad luck.
As if to prove the point, the Bible tells us there were exactly 13
betrayed Jesus Christ, setting the stage for the Crucifixion.
Did I mention the Crucifixion took place on a Friday?
Bad Friday
It is said: Never change your bed on Friday; it will bring bad dreams.
Don't start a trip on Friday or you will have misfortune. If you cut
your nails on Friday, you cut them for sorrow. Ships that set sail on
hundred years ago, the British government sought to quell once and for
all the widespread superstition among seamen that setting sail on
Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned, named "H.M.S.
Friday." They laid her keel on a Friday, launched her on a Friday,
selected her crew on a Friday and hired a man named Jim Friday to be
her captain. To top it off, H.M.S. Friday embarked on her maiden
voyage on a Friday, and was never seen or heard from again.
Some say Friday's bad reputation goes all the way back to the Garden
of Eden.
t was on a Friday, supposedly, that Eve tempted Adam with the
forbidden fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned in Sunday School, and
they were both ejected from Paradise. Tradition also holds that the
Great Flood began on a Friday; God tongue-tied the builders of the
Tower of Babel on a Friday; the Temple of Solomon was destroyed on a
Friday; and, of course, Friday was the day of the week on which Christ
was crucified. It is therefore a day of penance for Christians.
In pagan Rome, Friday was execution day (later Hangman's Day in
Britain), but in other pre-Christian cultures it was the sabbath, a
day of worship, so those who indulged in secular or self-interested
activities on that day could not expect to receive blessings from the
or starting important projects on Fridays.
To complicate matters, these pagan associations were not lost on the
early Church, which went to great lengths to suppress them. If Friday
was a holy day for heathens, the Church fathers felt, it must not be
"Witches' Sabbath," and thereby hangs another tale.
The Witch-Goddess
The name "Friday" was derived from a Norse deity worshipped on the
sixth day, known either as Frigg (goddess of marriage and fertility),
or Freya (goddess of sex and fertility), or both, the two figures
having become intertwined in the handing-down of myths over time (the
etymology of "Friday" has been given both ways). Frigg/Freya
corresponded to Venus, the goddess of love of the Romans, who named
the sixth day of the week in her honor "dies Veneris."
Friday was actually considered quite lucky by pre-Christian Teutonic
its traditional association with love and fertility. All that changed
likely Freya in this context, given that the cat was her sacred animal
associated with evil doings.
Various legends developed in that vein, but one is of particular
interest: As the story goes, the witches of the north used to observe
their sabbath by gathering in a cemetery in the dark of the moon. On
one such occasion the Friday goddess, Freya herself, came down from
her sanctuary in the mountaintops and appeared before the group, who
numbered only 12 at the time, and gave them one of her cats, after
The Unluckiest Day of All
The astute reader will have observed that while we have thus far
insinuated any number of intriguing connections between events,
practices and beliefs attributed to ancient cultures and the
superstitious fear of Fridays and the number 13, we have yet to happen
upon an explanation of how, why or when these separate strands of
the 13th as the unluckiest day of all.
various explanations have been proposed.
The Knights Templar
One theory, recently offered up as historical fact in the novel The Da
Vinci Code, holds that it came about not as the result of a
convergence, but a catastrophe, a single historical event that
happened nearly 700 years ago. The catastrophe was the decimation of
the Knights Templar, the legendary order of "warrior monks" formed
during the Christian Crusades to combat Islam. Renowned as a fighting
force for 200 years, by the 1300s the order had grown so pervasive and
powerful it was perceived as a political threat by kings and popes
alike and brought down by a church-state conspiracy, as recounted by
Katharine Kurtz in Tales of the Knights Templar (Warner Books: 1995):
"On October 13, 1307, a day so infamous that Friday the 13th would
become a synonym for ill fortune, officers of King Philip IV of France
carried out mass arrests in a well-coordinated dawn raid that left
obscenities, and homosexual practices. None of these charges was ever
but in the seven years following the arrests, hundreds of Templars
suffered excruciating tortures intended to force 'confessions,' and
more than a hundred died under torture or were executed by burning at
the stake."
A Thoroughly Modern Phenomenon
There are drawbacks to the "day so infamous" thesis, not the least of
which is that it attributes enormous cultural significance to a
relatively obscure historical event. Even more problematic, for this
or any other theory positing premodern origins for Friday the 13th
superstitions, is the fact that no one has been able to document the
existence of such beliefs prior to the 19th century. If people who
lived before the late 1800s perceived Friday the 13th as a day of
special misfortune, no evidence has been found to prove it. As a
result, some scholars are now convinced the stigma is a thoroughly
modern phenomenon exacerbated by 20th-century media hype.
Going back a hundred years, Friday the 13th doesn't even merit a
mention in E. Cobham Brewer's voluminous 1898 edition of the
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, though one does find entries for
fate finally does make an appearance in later editions of the text, it
is without extravagant claims as to the superstition's historicity or
longevity. The very brevity of the entry is instructive: "A
dollop of misfortune attributed to Friday the 13th can be accounted
for in terms of an accrual, so to speak, of bad omens:
Unlucky Friday + Unlucky 13 = Unluckier Friday.
If that's the case, we are guilty of perpetuating a misnomer by
labeling Friday the 13th "the unluckiest day of all," a designation
perhaps better reserved for, say, a Friday the 13th on which one
breaks a mirror, walks under a ladder, spills the salt, and spies a
spent in the safety of one's own home with doors locked, shutters
closed and fingers crossed.
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