Why Is Friday the 13th Considered “Unlucky”?
Happy Friday the 13th! Brand Engagement Director Brianna here to talk to you about the history and lore behind this supposedly unlucky day.
Before masked mothers and sons started tormenting campers, there was fear surrounding the number 13 in combination with Fridays. The fear of the number 13 even has a name: triskaidekaphobia. Why is this number and day so haunting to us?
As with many superstitions, it likely goes back to a mythological and/or religious origin. In Norse mythology, Loki supposedly crashed a banquet at Valhalla, which increased the godly attendance from 12 to 13. Loki, being the trickster god he is, deceived the blind god Hodr; Hodr shot his brother Baldur, the god of light, joy, and goodness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow, killing him instantly.
By the beginning of the Christian era, this fear of 13 was well-established thanks to Norse mythology’s spread from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Judas allegedly made things a lot worse by arriving 13th at the Last Supper, before his eventual betrayal of Jesus. Add on top of that the significance of Fridays in this particular story, and we get the superstition we carry to this day.
Despite ancient origins, the concept of Friday the 13th as a particularly bad day didn't start to pop up in our collective consciousness until the 19th century. It became cemented culturally in the early 20th century thanks to Thomas William Lawson’s novel “Friday, the 13th,” depicting a stock broker selecting it as the day in which he will set about events that would devastate Wall Street.
Outside of fiction, has anything bad actually happened on Friday the 13th? Seeing as it is more common in the Gregorian calendar for the 13th of the month to fall on a Friday than any other day of the week, yes:
The “Black Friday” fires (January 1939): 71 people died as a direct result, and 438 more died due to the resulting heat wave.
The German bombing of Buckingham Palace (September 1940): That this led to only one death is astonishing.
A cyclone in Bangladesh (November 1970): This storm killed more than 300,000 people.
The disappearance of a Uruguayan Air Force plane in the Andes, and a similarly devastating plane crash in Russia — the worst in the nation’s history (October 1972): While there were many casualties, at least 16 individuals survived in the Andes. Unfortunately, all 174 passengers on the Russian plane died.
The death of rapper Tupac Shakur (September 1996): Perhaps justice will be coming in this case.
The crash of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the coast of Italy (January 2012): It ended up killing 30 people.
The COVID-19 pandemic officially starts in the U.S. (March 2020): It was the beginning of a totally chill and unifying time.
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