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Today is Friday the 13th and, in Western culture, it is known as an unlucky day. There’s even a name for it a fear of the day: paraskevidekatriaphobia. This stems from the word Triskaidekaphobia which is a fear of the number 13.
The fear of the number 13 has a few different reasons for the unluckiness, such as in the Christian faith where there were 13 people at Jesus’ last supper.
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In Norse mythology, there is a story about the trickster god Loki ruining a dinner party by arriving as the 13th guest despite not being invited and causing mischief.
There is also a superstition from 1774 about 13 people sitting at a table. If that happens it was believed that one of them would die within a year.
Friday itself has also been considered unlucky in some cultures, particularly with sailors who believed that it was unlucky to set sail on a Friday. This is said to be because it was a Friday that Jesus was crucified and Friday the day that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit.
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It therefore does not take a genius to see that putting the two together has thus become the epitome of unlucky. This though was not really thought of until the 19th century.
On of the first documented accounts of the day being unlucky was from a character in a play called ‘Les Finesses des Gribouilles’ in 1834. They have a line where it is said: “I was born on a Friday, December 13, 1813, from which come all of my misfortunes”.
From there it has only been popularised more like in the 1907 novel by T.W. Lawson ‘Friday, the Thirteenth‘. In this story, a broker with no morals takes advantage of the superstition associated with the day to create panic on Wall Street.
In modern times we have the slasher movie ‘Friday the 13th’ where we see hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees go on a murderous rampage.
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