September 13, 2013
Dear Everyone:
Greetings upon Friday, the 13th, a date widely considered
unlucky in the extreme.
How many times per year can you have such an ignominious combination?
There actually is a complicated mathematical formula for figuring
this out. But the simplest
thing to do is look at an annual calendar.
If the first Sunday of a month falls on the first day of the
month, there will be a Friday the 13th.
This year, we get two:
September and December.
So why is Friday the 13th considered unlucky?
That’s easy: Friday
is an unlucky day; 13 is an unlucky number.
Putting the two of them together is just asking for trouble.
Why is Friday unlucky? Easy
again. In the
Christian
tradition, Christ was executed by the
Romans on a Friday.
And why is the number 13 unlucky?
Well, that one’s a little more complicated.
There are, literally, dozens of “examples” of how the number 13 is
unlucky. One of the first
that most people will provide is that there were thirteen people at the
Last Supper. Again, this
occurs in the Christian tradition.
However, there were probably considerably more than thirteen people at
the Last Supper. When the
people who wrote the gospels started counting followers, they simply
stopped counting at twelve.
And, of course, they only counted the male disciples.
People like
Mary, Jesus’s mother, and
Mary Magdalene, weren’t
“important” enough to count, although tradition states that they were
certainly in attendance.
When I pointed out to one of the
nuns at school one day, that after the
suicide of Judas Iscariot, there were only eleven disciples left, she
quickly corrected me: “One of the
others took his place.”
The unluckiness of the number 13 is not limited to Christianity.
In Norse mythology, there was a party at
Valhalla in which a
dozen gods were having a good time.
Loki, the Trickster, crashed the party, raising the number to 13.
When Balder was killed in the ensuing free-for-all, it was proof
that the number 13 was unlucky.
In the fairy tale of
Sleeping Beauty, twelve fairies were invited to
attend the christening of the infant princess.
When a thirteenth fairy, angry at being left out, came and laid a
curse on the princess, more proof.
I know what you’re thinking:
There were only three fairies in the
Disney animated feature
film. That’s because
Walt
Disney, in a brilliant
foreshadowing of corporate America, “downsized”
the dozen fairies to a representative three.
More recent examples include the
Apollo 13 moon mission, which had to be scrubbed when an accident
hampered the oxygen supply.
And the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship that ran aground on (you guessed it!)
Friday the 13th.
There’s even a special word for the fear of the number 13:
triskaidekaphobia.
Which is simply the
Greek words for “three” plus “ten” plus
“fear”. Try saying it three
times really fast.
Of course, not everyone agrees that 13 is unlucky.
When the
king of France attacked the
Knights Templar, back in
1307, he deliberately chose Friday the 13th because it would
be unlucky for the Knights, thus lucky for him.
In his case, it worked.
Certain entertainers and sports figures consider the number a
fortunate one for them and all of
Italy agrees that 13 is perfectly
safe, except at the dinner table.
But most people in the Western culture regard 13 as something to be
avoided, which is why many buildings “don’t have” a 13th
floor. They just “skip” from
12 to 14. I once worked in a
building that did have a 13th floor, but failed to mention
that it had another floor between the 18th and 19th
floors. It was where they
hid the Records Center.
As for me, I just remember that famous (or infamous) sentiment:
It’s bad luck to be
superstitious.
Love, as always,
Pete
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