It's Friday the 13th,
and any minute now the walls will start bleeding. Now you'll have
something topical to discuss while you're hiding in the nearest
church, hoping and praying to hold out until sunrise.
Friday the 13th
happens at least once every year, but may happen as many as three
times in a single year. It occurs when the first day of the month is
a Sunday.
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| Here's an enlightening photo from Wikipedia. ~ W.J. Pilsak |
1) Fear of the 13th
day of the month falling on Friday is called friggatriskaidekaphobia.
If that's too difficult for you, simply call it
paraskevidekatriaphobia instead. It means the same thing.
2) Historical records
indicate that superstitions about Friday the 13th being
unlucky emerged in the 19th century and gained popularityin the 20th. The 1907 publication Thomas W. Lawson's novel Friday, the Thirteenth, may have helped to bring this
superstition into mainstream cultural consciousness. This Friday,
the Thirteenth was about unscrupulous stockbrokers and did not
involve any murdering, as far as I am aware.
3) Both Friday and the
number 13 have been considered unlucky for hundreds of years, albeit
separately. The idea that Friday is an unlucky day, especially to for
new undertakings, springs up for the first time in The Canterbury
Tales, which date back to the 14th century. Some have
suggested that Friday gets a bad rap because, in the Christian
tradition, that's the day when Jesus died.
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| Makes about as much sense as anything else. |
4) Fear of the number 13
dates back to the time of the Vikings. They believed that, if 13
people dined together, one of them would die before the year was out.
At some point in the 1800s in the United States, these two
superstitions underwent a merger that, like most things in this
country, is often blamed on the Freemasons.
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| They're on your dollar bills, man! |
4) By the 1880s, Friday the
13th was A Thing in the United States. On 13 January 1881
(a Friday) the first meeting of The Thirteen Club was held. At this
meeting, 13 people rented the 13th room of a venue (a
hotel, presumably; Wikipedia doesn't tell me which one), and sat down
to eat at 8:13 PM. They entered the room by walking under a ladder
and ate among piles of spilled salt, so I guess they didn't need to
pass the shaker around. A good time was had by all, nobody died an
untimely death and the practice was repeated annually, across the
country and by hundreds of people, for the next 40 years. Yet there
are still some folks who won't walk under ladders.
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| The "unlucky" part happens when the painter drops a bucket on your head. ~ Lukeroberts |
5) In fact, in the United
States alone, 17 to 21 million people fear Friday the 13th
, some so much that they won't even get out of bed. It's estimated
that businesses in the U.S. lose up to $900 million dollars that day
just from people being too pussified to go out and buy things. In the
Netherlands, an average of 300 fewer car accidents occur on Friday
the 13th, because those 300 people stayed home. So if you
have to drive in the Netherlands, do it on Friday the 13th.
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| Unless you're American, you pussy. |
