April 13, 2007

• Paraskevidekatriaphobia

  

  The thirteenth of the month is slightly more likely to be on a Friday than on any other day of the week.  Due to the Gregorian calendar’s pattern of leap years, the entire pattern repeats every 400 years.

  out of 400 years:

  day     number of 13s     fraction

  Sunday      687     14.31%
  Monday     685     14.27%
  Tuesday     685     14.27%
  Wednesday       687        14.31%
  Thursday     684     14.25%
  Friday        688     14.33%
  Saturday     684     14.25%

  Eric Weisstein

   

  Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro, and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen were
  born on Friday the Thirteenth.
  Hubert Humphrey and Tupac Shakur died
  on Friday the Thirteenth.

  The ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon mission was launched at 1313 hours Houston time, from pad 39 (13×3) and had to be aborted on April 13, 1970.

  In Western cultures, particularly those that speak German, Portuguese, or English, there is a widespread belief that when a Friday falls on the 13th of any month, it is an unlucky day.  Some sources say it is the most widely believed superstition in the United States, but there are over twice as many Americans who claim not to believe in it as those who admit to being afraid of Friday the thirteenth.  Although many sources claim that this is an “ancient” superstition, the earliest known reference to it in print was in the late 1800s.

  Fear of the number 13 is older than the fear of Friday the thirteenth, but it has never been universal.  In Chinese culture, for example, thirteen is considered a lucky number.  Early Egyptians associated thirteen with the afterlife, and some people believe it was that idea, corrupted into a fear of death rather than the joyful anticipation of life after death, which formed the basis for the fear of “unlucky 13″.

  According to about.com:

  A study published in the British Medical Journal in 1993 entitled “Is Friday the 13th Bad for Your Health?”  With the aim of mapping “the relation between health, behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United Kingdom,” its authors compared the ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th, over a period of years.

  Incredibly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number of hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents was significantly higher than on “normal” Fridays.

  Their conclusion:

  “Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended.”

  —————-

  It is said: If 13 people sit down to dinner
  together, all will die within the year. The Turks so disliked the
  number 13 that it was practically expunged from their vocabulary
  (Brewer, 1894). Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue.
  Many buildings don’t have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your
  name, you will have the devil’s luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson,
  Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters
  in their names). There are 13 witches in a coven.

  Though no one
  can say for sure when and why human beings first associated the number
  13 with misfortune, the belief is assumed to be quite old and there
  exist any number of theories purporting to trace its origins to
  antiquity and beyond.

  It has been proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the number 13 are as ancient as the act of counting.

  Primitive
  man had only his 10 fingers and two feet to represent units, so he
  could not count higher than 12, according to this explanation. What lay
  beyond that –13 — was an impenetrable mystery, hence an object of
  superstition. Which has a lovely, didactic ring to it, but one is left
  wondering: did primitive man not have toes?
  

  thothweb

  Besides the scary (for Christians) pagan association with the 13-member covens (twelve witches and the devil, according to some accounts), it is written that there were thirteen people present at the last supper before the crucifixion.  Then, too, the crucifixion was said to have occurred on Friday, Friday is the Muslim Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath starts at sunset on Friday, and that may have been enough to convince some Christians that Friday was an unlucky day, and if it fell on the thirteenth of the month, even worse.
  
  Friday also apparently got an evil reputation because it was named for the Norse Goddess Frigg or Fricka, Odin’s wife, whom some people confuse with Freya.  Both of them were associated with sex, marriage, love, and fertility and, along with the other love goddesses Venus and Aphrodite, were tainted by the Puritans’ fear and rejection of fleshly pleasure and the Victorians’ misguided Malthusian efforts to curtail overpopulation by inhibiting sexual relations.  Venus got such a bad rap that sexually transmitted diseases were long called “venereal” disease.

  My favorite origin myth for the Friday the Thirteenth fear is favored by some Masonic historians.  It involves the French monarch Philip IV, known as Phillippe le Bel, and Pope Clement V.  On September 14, 1307, King Philip mailed sealed orders to all his seneschals and bailiffs, forbidding them under penalty of death to open the papers before Thursday
  night, October 12.  The royal secret was kept, preserving the element of surprise.  Le Bel’s orders were prefaced by these words:

  “A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to think of and terrible to hear, a detestable crime, an execrable evil deed, an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing wholly inhuman, foreign to all humanity, has, thanks to the reports of several persons worthy of faith, reached our ears, not without striking us with great astonishment and causing us to tremble with violent horror, and, as we consider its gravity an immense pain rises in us, all the more cruelly because there is no doubt that the enormity of the crime overflows to the point of being an offence to the divine majesty, a shame for humanity, a pernicious example of evil and a universal scandal.”

  Source: grouchogandhi

  

     “When [Jacques] de Molay retired that night, there was no way he could have known that just before the dawn of the next day an event would occur of such shattering dimensions that the date, Friday the Thirteenth, would live for centuries in the minds of millions as the unluckiest day of the year.”
      — Born in Blood:
      The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry,
      John J. Robinson

      “And so it was at dawn of the following day, Friday the Thirteenth in October of 1307, that almost every Templar knight, priest, sergeant, and servant in France was arrested and put in chains. The arresting party at the Paris Temple was led by the king’s chancellor in person, probably to assure admittance. The date was ever after regarded as an ominous time, but although for the rest of the world it might have become an amusing superstition, for the Knights Templar that Friday the Thirteenth was the unluckiest day of that or any other year. Their torture began the same day.”
      — Dungeon, Fire and Sword:
      The Knights Templar in the Crusades,
      John J. Robinson

   ”[The Knights Templar], it must be remembered, was, with the sole exception of the Papacy, the most important, most powerful, most prestigious, most apparently unshakable institution of its age. At the time of [King] Philippe’s attack, it was nearly two centuries old and regarded as one of the central pillars of Western Christendom. For most of it contemporaries, it seemed as immutable, as durable, as permanent as the Church herself. That such an edifice should be so summarily demolished rocked the foundation upon which rested the assumptions and beliefs of the epoch. Thus, for example, Dante, in the ‘The Divine Comedy’, expresses his shock and his sympathy for the persecuted ‘White Mantles’. Indeed, the superstition which holds Friday the 13th to be a day of misfortune is believed to stem from Philippe’s initial raids on Friday, 13 October 1307.”
      — The Temple and the Lodge,
      Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh

  In 1314 Grand Master Jacques De Molay, and leaders Hugh De Perault, and Godfrey De Goneville were burnt at the stake still loudly protesting their innocence. Soon after, a legend arose that Molay’s last words were a curse on Philip and the weak-willed Pope who had allowed the trials, and that the deaths of both the King and the Pope within a year of the execution death were in fulfillment of that curse, and the date of Friday the thirteenth has been considered cursed ever since.

  altreligion.about.com

  It is said that Phillippe le Bel’s grudge against the templars arose out of rejection, that after the king’s wife died he had tried to join the Templars and was blackballed.  It is also likely that issues of power and greed were involved.

  In 2002, a secret document [The Chinon Parchment] was unearthed in the Vatican archives. Dated August, 1308, and bearing Pope Clement’s signature, the parchment officially absolved the Templar leadership of wrongdoing. Clement apparently did not have the fortitude to stand up for what he believed, however, and made no attempt to exonerate the Knights.

  inrebus.com

  

  • 12:48 am
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