Friday The 13th: Mind The Date, Not The Superstition

By Eliza Hallabeck

It has been referred to as both the most widely spread superstition, and simply an urban legend. Either way, Friday the 13th is once again here, and will occur two more times this year on March 13 and November 13.

Paraskavedekatriaphobiais is the fear of Friday the 13th, while the fear of the number 13 itself is triskaidekaphobia. While the fear of both the number and the day have been made popular by different media outlets, like movies, the history behind both are foggy and seemingly connected.

As Nathaniel Lachenmeyer explains in his book 13: The Story of the World’s Most Notorious Superstition, the origin of the Friday the 13th fear came from two separate fears; the fear of Friday, and the fear of the number 13.

The fear of the number 13 had greater weight than the fear of Friday in Mr Lachenmeyer’s book, because he traced the fear of the number to the superstition that when 13 people sit at a table, one of them will die within the year.

This theory he said, could have come from the biblical account of the Last Supper, where Jesus Christ dines at a table with his 12 disciples. One version of this theory considers Jesus Christ’s crucifixion as the sign of the 13 at a table superstition, and some another version considers Judas Iscariot’s death due to betraying Jesus as a sign of the superstition.

“Competing theories then suggest that the 13 superstition is so ancient and its history so fragmentary that no one will ever know the truth. Many reject the Last Supper theory on the grounds that unlucky 13 predates the Christian era,” Mr Lachenmeyer wrote.

According to Mr Lachenmeyer’s book, the “13 at a table” theory was popular throughout the 19th Century, and was the precursor to the two more known unlucky number 13 superstitions today; the thirteenth floor superstition and the Friday the 13th superstition.

In another Friday the 13th theory, made popular by Dan Brown’s fictional novel The Da Vinci Code, the mass killing of an order of knights, known as the Knights Templar, marked Friday the 13th as a dark day.

Katherine Kurtz’s Tales Of The Knights Templar book also mentions this: “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 several thousand Templars — knights, sergeants, priests, and serving brethren — in chains, charged with heresy, blasphemy, various obscenities, and homosexual practices.”

According to Snopes.com, it was not until the 17th Century that Western literature began to reference Friday as a day to be associated with bad luck.

Mr Lachenmeyer’s theory in his book is that the two superstitions combined to create a day associated with bad luck.