Friday the 13th is upon us, and while many of us will sit down with a bowl of popcorn and watch Jason Voorhees (or his mom…or Roy Burns) tear through some unsuspecting teenagers, one in four Americans is superstitious. Some plan accordingly around the holiday to make it as safe as possible.
So, what is it about the day that makes airlines lower ticket prices, has drivers clicking their seat belts more, and workers scheduling the day off? My inner geek wanted to get to the bottom of the myth, and well, like most superstitions and fears, Friday the 13th seems to be rooted in a combination of different religious events.
Let’s start with the number 13. The earliest known intentional aversions to the “unlucky number 13” go back to Norse mythology. Historian Donald Dossey cited that the origin was actually brought up in a Norse myth about 12 gods attending a dinner party in Valhalla. When Loki, the god of mischief and tricks, shows up uninvited as the 13th guest, he cons Hoor, the son of Odin and Frigg, to shoot the typically invulnerable Balder with a mistletoe-tipped arrow. Balder ends up dying, and the entire Earth went dark with sadness. From that point, the number 13 that Loki represented was seen as unlucky.
Similar to the Norse myth, the biblical story of Jesus’ Last Supper tied an unlucky connotation to the number 13, when Judas Iscariot, the 13th guest at the table, betrayed Christ. The gospels tied the number 13 to Friday when Jesus Christ was crucified on a Friday after Judas’ betrayal.
However, Friday was already established as an unlucky day in biblical references, as it was also the day that Adam and Eve consumed the forbidden fruits in the Garden of Eden, as well as the day the Great Flood (Noah’s Ark) began.
In actual human record, rather than stories, The Code of Hammurabi was probably the earliest written recorded aversion of the number 13. The Code of Hammurabi was a code of 282 written laws on stone tablets by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi in 1755 BC. The 13th law was left out of the 282 due to its connection with bad luck, though some historians say this was just a numbers error.
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The superstition of the actual day gained steam in the 1300s, when Philip IV, the King of France, started the Trials of the Knights Templar and began arresting the Christian Templar knights tasked with protecting the roads of Jerusalem to obtain their wealth. This was seen as a massive tragedy among the people, and the arrests began on October 13th, 1307, on…you guessed it, a Friday.
The spooky date made its way into the influential world of music through the years, as well-known Italian composer Gioachino Rossini made his superstition of both the number and the day well known, and then died on Friday the 13th. Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg also feared using the number in his compositions, omitting the 13th measures for the notation of 12a. He also passed away on Friday the 13th, at the age of 76 (7+6 = 13…spooooky).
The more modern aversions to Friday the 13th came with both the 1907 novel from Thomas W. Lawson, Friday the Thirteenth, which told the story of a dishonest stockbroker that plays on the fear of superstitions to create a panic and crash the market on Wall Street on Friday the 13th, and of course the American horror-slasher Friday the 13th franchise that has spanned for 40+ years.
Other unlucky events that give credence to the date’s superstition include the German bombing of Buckingham Palace (1940), the famous murder of New Yorker Kitty Genovese (1964), the Bangladesh cyclone that killed more than 300,000 people (1970), the death of Tupac Shakur (1996) and the crash of a Costa Concordia cruise ship, killing 30 people on board (2012).
So, now you know this history, and whether you have Paraskevidekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th) and are staying home today coiled in bubble wrap or just want to watch a dude in a hockey mask slaughter teens with your friends, we hope you have a safe Friday the 13th!
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