This Friday, I thought we could look into the origins of the superstitions about Fridays in general, and Friday the Thirteenth in specific. The scientific term for this belief is friggatriskaidekaphobia. The belief in Friday as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number both predate the belief that Friday the Thirteenth is especially unlucky—and both superstitions are so old it’s almost impossible to determine exactly where each came from.
The idea that Friday is unlucky might have come from the biblical tradition that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, a tradition that led to Friday as a fasting day in Christian tradition. Friday is not considered unlucky in most other religions, nor in countries where the majority religion is not Christianity. Many cite the Bible as proof that the number thirteen is unlucky as well, claiming that Judas, who betrayed Jesus, was the thirteenth guest at the Last Supper. However, there is no evidence in the Bible of which guest arrived at which time, so there is no proof that Judas was, in fact, the thirteenth. There were thirteen at the table that night, though, so that could be behind the idea of unlucky thirteen.
In actual fact, however, there is good evidence that thirteen was associated with misfortune and death in many Catholic countries before the Reformation. In Tarot Cards, for example, Death has been numbered thirteen since at least 1565, when its number “is mentioned in Francesco Piscina’s Discorso Sopre l’Ordine Delle Figure de Tarocchi (Discourse on the Order of the Tarot Trumps).”
One idea about the unluckiness of thirteen is mathematical. Twelve is a number with many divisors, making it both a “superior highly composite number” and a “colossally abundant number.” It is divisible by two, three, four, and six, and so is useful for many applications, which we can see in the division of the year into twelve months, the clock face into twelve hours, the foot into twelve inches, and so on. “Skeptical researcher Joe Nickell and others suggest that because of the symbolism of twelve as perfect completion, thirteen might represent ’the first departure from divine completeness or the initial step towards evil.’” There is, however, no proof that this explanation is the correct one.
Folklore specialist Stephen Winick introduces the concept of metafolklore: folk stories about folk beliefs. The story about thirteen being compared with the perfect twelve is an example of this concept, as is the idea that the Code of Hammurabi, an ancient Mesopotamian law text, omitted Law #13 and skipped from #12 to #14. This seems to foreshadow the modern practice of skipping the thirteenth floor on a building and would suggest that the belief in unlucky thirteen is nearly 4,000 years old. However, the truth is that the laws in this code are unnumbered on the original stone on which they were carved. Any omission in numbering, therefore, occurred after the code was rediscovered in the Twentieth Century. The story of the code’s connection to the belief in unlucky thirteen is modern metafolklore.
Another “metafolkloric” explanation for the number involves Norse mythology. In this case, the idea is that of another dinner party, this one with twelve gods instead of twelve disciples. The trickster god Loki supposedly arrived uninvited—the thirteenth guest—and engineered the death of Baldr, The problem with this story is that neither the prose nor the poetic versions of the Edda (the primary source material for the story of Baldr’s death) feature a dinner party, nor do they specify how many gods were present when he was killed. As Winick says, “Perhaps this was an attempt to make the tradition seem older than it is. If so, this is creative metafolklore at its best.”
Metafolklore also has an answer for when Unlucky Thirteen and Unlucky Friday were combined into the belief that Friday the Thirteenth is especially unlucky “Search the web,” says Winick,” and you’ll find lots of sites relating the origin of a belief in unlucky Friday the Thirteenth to the destruction of the Knights Templar, which occurred on Friday, October 13, 1307.” This theory has been popularized in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, but historians have never been convinced of its truth. The date of the initial attack on the Templars is accurate enough, but nobody seems to have connected this date to the belief that Friday the Thirteenth is unlucky—until the 20th Century.
Winick himself believes that the idea of Unlucky Friday the Thirteenth came to us via France. The earliest clear references he has found come from French works, two of which date from 1834. In one, an article in the Revue de Paris, a murder on Friday the Thirteenth was explained with the phrase “Ce sont toujours ces vendredis et ces nombres, treize qui portent malheur!” (“It is always Friday and the number thirteen that bring bad luck!”). And in a play from the same year, Les Finesses des Gribouilles, a character states, “Je suis né un vendredi, treize décembre, 1813, d’ou viennent tous mes melheurs!” (“I was born on a Friday, December 13, 1813, from which come all my misfortunes.”). Later examples show that by the middle of the 19th Century, the idea that Friday the Thirteenth was unlucky was a common one in France.
This resulted in a belief in the United States that Europeans, especially the French, believed in the unluckiness of Friday the Thirteenth. This was later generalized to “superstitious people” instead of Europeans, and, often, articles debunked the belief. People even formed clubs to disprove the belief, such as the Thirteen Club of New York, which first met on Friday, January 13, 1882.
The founder of The Thirteen Club was one Captain William Fowler, who had attended Public School 13, built thirteen structures over his career, fought in thirteen Civil War conflicts, belonged to thirteen clubs, and, whenever possible, did significant things on the thirteenth of any month. According to a write-up in the New York Historical Society, the inaugural meeting of Fowler’s club took place at 8:13 in the evening, in room 13 of a building Fowler owned called the Knickerbocker Cottage (although it was on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth, not Thirteenth Street). Attendees passed underneath a ladder and consumed thirteen courses (including a coffin-shaped lobster salad). A year later, the club secretary reported that “out of the entire roll of membership…whether they have participated or not at the banquet table, NOT A SINGLE MEMBER IS DEAD, or has even had a serious illness.”
So, nobody knows where the belief in Unlucky Thirteen or Unlucky Friday actually came from, but “superstitious people” still believe that Friday the Thirteenth is especially unlucky. Is your character a superstitious person or a nay-sayer? It might be interesting to note.
J.E.S. Hays
www.jeshays.com
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