claim: Friday the 13th is a day fraught with peril.
origin: Although most of us would probably affirm that superstitionâ€™s role in Western culture is now a much diminished one, more a source of amusement than anything else, there are still those who allowÂ their trepidation over particular days or dates to prevent them from engaging in their choice of activities. We may make jokes about Friday the 13th and only kiddingly instruct loved ones to exercise greater care on that day, but those who suffer from a fear of the number thirteen (triskaidekaphobia) or a fear of Friday the 13th (paraskevidekatriaphobia) may genuinely feel limited by the rumored potential for ill luck connected with the date. The reasons why Friday came to be regarded as a day of bad luck have been obscured by the mists of time â€” some of the more common theories link it to a significant event in Christian tradition said to have taken place on Friday, such as the Crucifixion, Eveâ€™s offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden, the beginning of the Great Flood, or the confusion at the Tower of Babel. Chaucer alluded to Friday as a day on which bad things seemed to happen in the Canterbury Tales as far back as the late 14th century (â€œAnd on a Friday fell all this mischanceâ€), but references to Friday as a day connected with ill luck generally start to show up in Western literature around the mid-17th century: From the early 19th century onward, examples abound of Fridayâ€™s being considered a bad day for all sorts of ordinary tasks, from writing letters to conducting business and receiving medical treatment: Friday was also said to be a particularly unlucky day on which to undertake anything that represented a beginning or the start of a new venture, thus we find references to all of the following activities as endeavors best avoided on Fridays: In some cases, Good Friday (the Friday before Easter) was regarded as an exception or â€˜antidoteâ€™ to the bad luck usually associated with Friday beginnings: The origins of the connection between the number thirteen and ill fortune are similarly obscure. Many different sources for the superstition surrounding the number thirteen have been posited, the most common stemming from another Christian source, the Last Supper, at which Judas Iscariot was said to have been the thirteenth guest to sit at the table. (Judas later betrayed Jesus, leading to His crucifixion, and then took his own life.) This Christian symbolism is reflected in early Western references to thirteen as an omen of bad fortune, which generally started to appear in the early 18th century and warned that thirteen people sitting down to a meal together presaged that one of them would die within the year: Superstition held that the victim would be the first person to rise from the table (or the last one to be seated), leading to the remedies of having all guests sit and stand at the same time, or seating one or more guests at a separate table: (The â€œthirteen at the tableâ€ form of superstition again harkens back to the Last Supper: the one who left the table first, Judas Iscariot, died at his own hand soon afterwards.) More generally, groups of thirteen people in any context â€” at a table, in a room, on a ship â€” were believed to inevitably lead to tragedy: By the late 19th century the superstition surrounding thirteen had become even more general, with people going out of their ways to avoid anything designated by the number thirteen, whether it be hotel rooms, desks, or cars: Once again these ill omens were avoided through artifice, such as the renumbering of rooms in hotels and inns to eliminate any Room #13â€™s, and misnumbering the floors above the 12th floor in multi-story buildings so that tenants could pretend 13th floors were really 14th floors. Just as Friday was considered an inauspicious day of the week on which to embark upon a new enterprise, so the 13th day of a month came to signify a particularly bad day for beginning a venture. Although regarding the confluence of a particularly unlucky day of the week (Friday) and a particularly unlucky day of the month (the 13th) as a date of supreme unluckiness might seem to be obvious and inevitable, superstitions regarding Friday the 13th are not nearly as old as most people tend to think. The belief in Friday the 13th as a day on which Murphyâ€™s Law reigns supreme and anything that can go wrong will go wrong appears to be largely a 20th century phenomenon. (The claim that the Friday the 13th superstition began with the arrest of the final Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques Demolay, on Friday, October 13, 1307, is a modern-day invention.) Not until the early part of the 20th century did regular expressions of Friday the 13th as a day of evil luck start popping up in the press. When we searched The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times for such references, in both newspapers the first mentions of the ill-fated date occured in 1908, as in this short piece about a U.S. senator from Oklahoma who dared to tempt fate by introducing 13 bills on Friday the 13th: (Itâ€™s interesting to note that this very early reference to Friday the 13th already describes it as being an â€œancient superstition.â€) Similarly, a 1913 piece described a minister who offered to marry free of charge any couple willing to take the matrimonial plunge on Friday the 13th: These days, however, one is unlikely to get so much as a free latte out of the day. Sanguinity comes at a price.