Unlucky for some Part 2

A few days ago (here) I talked about the number 13 and its associations with bad luck. 

Today, as promised, we're going to look at what happened when 13 met Friday.

Historically, Friday has always been considered the unluckiest day of the week. Some say it’s because Jesus was crucified on a Friday, although I'm not sure how we can be quite so precise when the exact dates of his birth and death aren’t even known. 

Another story, which is patently nonsense, states that Eve offered Adam the forbidden fruit on a Friday  (as if they'd got around to inventing a calendar). Other stories claim that The Great Flood began on a Friday, or that it was the day that the Tower of Babel fell down, or it was the day upon which St Monan died while fighting malignant spirits, or ... 

There are a lot more, each more spurious than the last. And they all claim to be right. But let’s be honest here. We just don’t know why Friday is considered unlucky. 

One explanation that seems slightly more plausible than some others (simply because it’s based upon historical precedent), is that the early Catholic Church associated Friday with women and paganism. And, on both counts, that made Friday a bad day. The day was originally known as deis Veneris and was strongly associated with Venus, Goddess of Love. A leftover of this is the French Vendredi, the Spanish Viernes, and the Italian Venerdi etc.. 

The closest equivalent Goddess to Venus in the British pagan pantheon was Frigg or Freya, the Norse goddess of love, relaxation and sex. Therefore the day became known as Frige dag or frigedæg, meaning the ‘Day of Frigg’. Frigg was the highest ranking female Norse God. She was married to boss god Odin and is said to have spun the clouds on her celestial spinning wheel. The constellation that we know as Orion was known to the Norse peoples as Frigg’s Spinning Wheel and the row of stars we call Orion’s Belt was Frigg’s distaff; the straight bit of wood upon which the unspun yarn sits. This strong, sexy, female figure would have seemed very threatening to male-dominated Christianity, particularly as it viewed Friday as a day of abstinence. So the Church vilified her, turning Frigg from a goddess into a witch. As an aside, this may have been partly responsible for the number 13 getting such a bad name. Frigg was said to join witches at their covens – usually a group of 12 women. 

In addition, many pre- and non-Christian cultures regarded Friday as their primary day of worship or, as in Judaism, a day of rest - the Jewish Shabbat begins just before sunset on a Friday. The Catholic Church wasn’t happy about that either and did all that it could to bad-mouth the day. They were helped along the way by the fact that Friday was traditionally set aside as execution day in pagan Rome; a leftover from the days when humans were sacrificed to appease a god on the ‘Holy’ day. In more recent history, Friday was Hangman's Day in the UK. So by associating it with witchcraft and death, it didn’t take too long for Friday to pick up a reputation. 

It’s bad luck to do pretty much anything on a Friday. It’s bad luck to travel, to change the bed, get married, move house, or get up after an illness. It's also bad luck to be be born on a Friday, as I was - but I didn't have much say in the matter.

You also shouldn't put butter churned or eggs laid on a Friday into a cake. That’s one piece of info they don’t put on the food labels in supermarkets. The one exception to the rule is the rather obviously-named Good Friday (the Friday before Easter). As the name suggests, Good Friday is so damned good that it cancels out the inherent badness of being a Friday. So, you can bake your cakes and change your sheets and hang whoever you like without fear of Karmic reprisals. 

My favourite story about unlucky Friday is the fascinating tale of HMS Friday: 

‘One hundred years ago, the British government sought to quell once and for all the widespread superstition among seamen that setting sail on Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned, named HMS Friday. They laid her keel on a Friday, launched her on a Friday, selected her crew on a Friday and hired a man named Jim Friday to be her captain. To top it off, HMS Friday embarked on her maiden voyage on a Friday. It was never seen or heard from again.’ 

Of course, it’s a load of old nonsense. I’ve spoken to the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth and they have no record of any such ship. And I’ve checked the listings on various British Navy-related websites (see here for a good example) and there’s no ship listed between the Freija and the Friendship. Yet it’s amazing, and slightly worrying, how many websites - and even newspapers - reprint this story as fact. It just shows that a good story – however inaccurate – will always be more popular than the truth. It’s what the urban myth debunking website Snopes calls False Authority Syndrome - if it's on a website, or in a book or magazine, or has been claimed by someone notable, it must be true.

But here’s a thing. Considering the age of the superstitions surrounding both Friday and the number 13, and the fact that they were both targets for the Church, they only seem to have come together relatively recently. I’ve discovered that the idea of Friday the 13th being mega-unlucky appears to be only just over 100 years old. 

‘Ah! But!’ I hear a nerdish cry. ‘I’m one of the legion of people who, for some odd reason, thought that The Da Vinci Code was something new and groundbreaking. Didn’t I read somewhere that Friday the 13th was the date when Jacques Demolay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was arrested?’

I’m afraid not. This is another mangling of history to make it fit some romantic pseudo-history involving the sexy, flavour-of-the-month Knights Templar. While it’s possible that Friday October 13th 1307 could have been the date of Demolay’s arrest, it’s a very obscure historical event that only really became common knowledge with the publication of Katharine Kurtz’s 1995 book Tales of the Knights Templar. So the three questions I’d ask are: 

1. Is such a precise date likely to be accurate? There are no official records of the arrest and historical events were not terribly well documented before the 18th century. 

2. Why would such an obscure event have provoked world-wide associations with bad luck? 

3. Why is not mentioned in older encyclopaedias or dictionaries? It isn't mentioned in Cobham Brewer's 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (though ‘Friday, an Unlucky Day’ and ‘Thirteen Unlucky’ do) or any other book before that time. 

The oldest reference for Friday the 13th that I’ve found is from Notes and Queries (11th Series, VIII 434) from 1913 where the author describes meeting a coach who ‘dreaded the evil luck of Friday the 13th.’ All of which means that Friday the 13th appears to be nothing more sinister or supernatural than a 20th century welding together of two existing bad luck superstitions, further cemented into modern culture by a century of horror films, novels and the tabloid press. 

There is always one Friday the 13th every year, sometimes two and, very occasionally, there are three. The technical name for fear of Friday the 13th is the marvellously tongue-twisting paraskevidekatriaphobia. The man who coined the term, psychotherapist Dr Donald Dossey, reckons that in America alone, there may be as many as 21 million paraskevidekatriaphobics (isn’t that a great word?). That’s a staggering 8% of the most powerful nation on Earth who are letting irrational superstitions affect their lives. 

Dossey, founder of the Stress Management Centre and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, states that: ‘It's been estimated that $800 or $900 million is lost in business on this day because people will not fly or do business they would normally do.’ Symptoms range from mild anxiety to full-blown panic attacks. The latter may cause people to reshuffle schedules or miss an entire day's work. 

But it’s all in the mind, surely? 

Yes, of course it is. And the paraskevidekatriaphobics (sorry - last time) among you might be reassured to know that, before the introduction of a formalised 24-hour day, people quite happily divided their daily lives into thirteen parts: 

1. After midnight. 

2. Cock-crow. 

3. Between the first cock-crow and daybreak. 

4. The Dawn. 

5. Morning. 

6. Noon. 

7. Afternoon. 

8. Sunset. 

9. Twilight. 

10. Evening. 

11. Candle-time. 

12. Bed-time. 

13. Dead of night. 

So, every day has a 13 in it. 

You’d better just stay in bed …