The Possible Origins Of Friday The 13th And Other Unlucky Days : NPR

The superstition that Friday the 13th is a day of bad luck has been around for 100 years, but it doesn’t have the ancient origins that many might expect.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why Friday the 13th is considered an unlucky day. Experts can only speculate.

“In the United States, we got it from England… it wasn’t considered an unlucky day in England until the 20th century. The first printed record we have of it is from 1913,” said Moira Marsh, a folklore librarian at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“People start making references to it being bad luck without saying why they think that is. And because of that, what you usually get is all kinds of crazy theories about why Friday the 13th is bad luck,” said Stephen Winick, a folklore specialist at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Some reasons why Friday the 13th is believed to be a day of bad luck

Some speculate that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day because Judas was the 13th guest at the Last Supper, or that the Knights Templar were condemned on a Friday the 13th. But Winick said experts don’t know if either of those things are true.

The earliest references Winick has seen to Friday the 13th being an unlucky day come from French writings and plays.

A character from the 1834 play The finesse of the Gribouilles It says: “I was born on Friday, December 13, 1813, from which all my misfortunes come.” And in the French literary magazine Paris MagazineThe Marquis of Salvo wrote about a father who killed his daughter on Friday the 13th and said: “It is always Fridays and the number thirteen that bring luck.”

While the combination of Friday and the 13th is a relatively new invention, the idea that Fridays bring bad luck is not.

“Fridays were considered unlucky days, and that has been true since the Middle Ages in the English-speaking world and probably in most of Europe, because Friday was the day of the crucifixion. And in the early Catholic tradition, all Fridays were days of penitence. And that idea has persisted,” Marsh said.

Marsh said the idea that 13 was an unlucky number did not appear until around the 17th century.

“Before that, it might have been considered a good number because it goes back to the 13 people who were supposedly at the Last Supper. Before the Reformation, Christians preferred to try to emulate that number.”

Marsh said that after the Reformation, ideas like that were banned as superstitious. And so what was considered a good number came to be considered a bad number.

There is another idea as to why the number 13 brings bad luck.

“12 is a number that has a lot of mathematical significance. It’s divisible by a lot of different numbers and it’s very useful mathematically for a lot of things,” Winick said. There are 12 months, 12 zodiac signs, 12 inches in a foot. “And then you get 13 and it’s kind of useless. It doesn’t really help you much mathematically.”

Unlucky days in other countries

Marsh and Winick say that thanks to popular culture, such as the film Friday the 13thThe day is now quite widespread in countries around the world and journalists have helped spread the popularity of the idea.

In Italy, Winick said, the unlucky day is usually Friday the 17th. And in Spanish-speaking countries, the unlucky day is usually Tuesday the 13th.

“People speculate that it’s because Tuesday is associated with the chaotic god of war. You know, Martes in Spanish is related to the god of war, Mars. So people think that might be the origin of Tuesday’s bad luck,” Winick said.

Marsh said that a Greek nurse from the 1960s may be another source who discovered that Tuesdays brought bad luck. According to this nurse, if a wedding ended on a Monday night, the women in the family would keep the bridge close so that their husband would not touch it. Because if any child was conceived on a Monday night, the beginning of Tuesday would be considered unlucky and the baby would likely have birth defects.

In Greece, Winick said they often link possible origins to ancient Greek culture. So they’ll think of ancient Greek mathematics, which had ideas that the number 12 was a good number and 13 was a bad number.

“We look for explanations for the chaotic experience of life. We want to explain to ourselves why things happened a certain way, why things didn’t go the way we wanted… it gives us a sense of control even though we don’t have it,” Winick said.

The digital article was edited by Adriana Gallardo and Obed Manuel.