The one where we take a look at just why there's so much strangeness behind bad luck, the number 13 and Fridays.
Linkies:
Friday the 13th rooted in the bible
Why is friday the 13th unlucky
Loose transcript
With all that out of the way, why are we here today? That’s a little unintentionally existential. I just mean what are we talking about today. I’ll get existential on the hologram earth episode but that’ll be at another time. If any of this is real at all. Today however we’re talking a fun little word: Triskaidekaphobia! The fear and aversion of the number 13. It’s bad luck we’ve all heard that right? I know I have but I never really gave it more thought than that, it’s a weird superstition and nothing more. But most superstitions have at least a little bit of folklore, historical precedent or other ghoulish tale surrounding them. So what better day to take a look at this ubiquitous superstition surrounding the number 13 than the thirteenth episode? Maybe a Friday the thirteenth, but that doesn’t really work for releasing on thursdays. But we’ll see if we can get one out on time won’t we.
Why thirteen though? Nobody really knows for sure, although we do know it’s mostly a western tradition. Middle easterners don’t trust the number 39, which happens to be thirteen thrice. And many easern countries and cultures do what they can to avoid the number 4 apparently because the word for number four in chinese, vietnamese, japanese and korean is close to their word for death.
So mostly the thirteen thing is a western thing. And there’s really no consensus on why that is so I’ll throw a couple of theories at ya and you can decide for yourself which explanation is most likely to impress the emo chick you’re trying to take home at the party. Don’t act like you don’t subtly think you’re intellectually superior because you listen to obscure occult history podcasts, you can’t bulls**t me I know why you’re really here. And I’m happy about it. I’m thrilled to be your wingman when you bring up this stupid stuff later.
Anyway here’s a few theories as to why the number 13 is considered unlucky in the west, the first and most likely historically seems to come from norse mythology. And I’m proud to announce this show is brought to you by thor love and thunder, in theaters this saturday, nah I’m just f**king with you, one day we might have a sponsor though, won’t that be nice?
So thirteen, Norse mythology, where are we? We have a lovely supper with a bunch of the gods hanging out having a grand old time especially my man baldur. The god of jo and gladness, he was just having himself uite a rumpus getting wasted with 11 other gods.
Flashback to when baldur was having prophetic dreams of his death, his mother frigga, wife of odin, yeah he was thor’s brother. His mother went to every entity in the universe collecting an oath from every single one of them that they would not hurt her son. Loki shows up, that f**king rapscallion and asks casually, hey is there anything that didn’t agree not to hurt baldur? She’s like no, but come to think of it I never asked mistletoe. It’s probably fine right? And boom loki poofs away.
*Back to the dinner, everyone goes back to one of their favorite hobbies, trying to kill baldur. Loki is the 13th guest and is not invited but shows up anyway. Might have something to do with him having sex with horses, I don’t know.
*Loki gets hodr, baldur and thor’s brother, even more wasted, who is blind to boot and he’s like throw this at him here I’ll help you throw it. He gives hodr a mistletoe spear and helps him aim and wouldn’t you know it, it kills baldur instantly.
*In short it births the tradition that if thirteen people are at a dinner table one of them will be dead by the end of the year. In baldurs case it was the end of the night. We’ll revisit that theme in just a minute. Can you think of anyone else that had an ill fated supper with 12 others? HMMMMM
*Baldur didn’t go unavenged though, wait you think someone blamed and killed loki? Nope, they made sure there was justice so odin f**ked a giant named rindr to give birth to a son Vali, who reaches maturity the day he’s born. And I thought a year of puberty or whatever was bad, jesus, hey there’s a spoiler. So Vali rockets from infant to middle age in a matter of hours and kills his blind half brother hodr, and is then pretty much never mentioned again in the norse sagas except that he survived ragnarok. I feel like it wasn’t really hodrs fault that much was it?
Loki eventually gets his comeuppance when they rip out the entrails of his son and use them to chain him up under a drooling serpent until the end of the world, I’m not an expert on norse mythology, but I think he’s still there getting acid venom dripped on him chained up with his son’s poop chute. I wonder how many times he got away with murder and stuff on the it’s just a prank bro defense?
So 13 gods show up to a twelve god party and someone dies big time. That seems to be the earliest thing historians point to, as for the origin of the aversion to 13.
Lets jump ahead a little bit, the close listeners probably can already tell where this is going. Dinner for 12 and a guest of honor? Something’s ringing a bell with that one. Of course You have Jesus and the last supper. Who was the 13th one at the table? One of history’s most well known traitors, up there with loki and Benedict Arnold, one Judas Iscariot. That’s not actually in the bible, the order they sat down, that is. So maybe John sat down last I don’t know. It certainly adds dramatic tension if he sat down last.
After the dinner Judas sold Jesus out for 30 pieces of silver, leading to his arrest and subsequent crucifixion and resurrection. That’s where friday comes into the whole mess. Pretty much everyone agrees the crucifixion took place on a friday, hence the holiday good friday. You see a pattern here, 13 was a bad egg, maybe that’s why they come in dozens, Jesus gets killed on friday. Naturally these things come together, at least you would think so right? Not exactly.
Both Friday and 13 were unlucky for a long time after these happenings but the first recorded use of Friday the 13th together as a concept wasn’t until 1913. This actually came from the American tradition of holding executions on fridays. Although that’s when the Romans would hold crucifixions as well so you’ll be forgiven for thinking that it’s older. With both that grisliness and the historical unluckyness of 13th it was just the sum of those two superstitions.
Another fun sticking point for Romans and 13 was that witch covens back then would reportedly claim 12 members. Leaving a 13th seat open for WHO BUT? THE DEVIL! Going back into the bible, some scholars believe Eve tempted Adam with the fruit on a friday, and additionally that Cain killed his brother Abel on a friday as well. There’s a lot of history that coalesces into this big superstition.
All that smushed together counts as number 2, so here’s number 3:
Numerology. I don’t generally put a whole lot of stock into numerology because it is really really easy to twist numbers and letters so that everything comes out to 666 or thirteen or whatever but I’m not gonna completely discount it either, I actually just did my numerology calculations and found it to be quite accurate, but I think that’s mostly just forer effect at work. I’ll toss a link in the notes at nightmarenow.com if you want to try too.
But numerologists make some convincing points about 13, and more importantly 12. There’s a lot riding on 12 in our universe and cultural consciousness. 12 months, 12 apostles, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 eggs, 12 hours in a day, 12 days of Christmas,12 gos on mount olympus, 12 inches in a foot, 12 inches of, forget that last one it’s a family show. The factors 3*4, 2*6,give you 3 plus 4 plus 2 plus 6 equals 12. It’s really got a lot going for it. Thirteen is a prime number and doesn’t do anything particularly notable besides being unlucky. So there’s the numerological aspect of ruining how f**king awesome 12 is.
Lastly some people will tell you about how Friday the 13th 1307 is the day that king Philip in France thought the knight’s templar got too big for their britches (they started a banking system), burned all the knight's templar at the stake and ALLEGEDLY brought ruin to their order. That did indeed happen on that date, but it doesn’t really click as a Friday the 13th concept for another 600 years. We’ll go deeper into all that crazy when I finish some books on the freemasons and their links to the knight’s templar, the crusades and of course the GRAILLL. Maybe we’ll live stream some treasure hunts, we’ll see what the nightmare now infrastructure is like by then.
Friday the thirteenth wasn’t perfected as a concept until much later though in 1980 when Jason Vorhees first wrought havoc on camp crystal lake. Actually I guess it isn’t technically Jason until Friday the 13th part II in 1981. You might whine that that is a spoiler a little bit but the movie came out 42 f**king years ago. Go see it if you haven’t yet.
So now we’re back to the beginning of the show, where I’ve taken you on a whirlwind journey through time to discover that the true meaning of friday the thirteenth was in you all along, and also take a year off the end of your life to help with your friends burst appendix like moundshroud. But what does it actually do in modern times?
Triskaidekaphobia, or the fear of the number 13 is estimated to afflict 10% of Americans and more worldwide, and they’re dumb. The only time you should fear a number is when you’re six and you saw that seven ate nine, I still wake up at night screaming thinking about it. So much blood.
THis article went on to talk with great sympathy about how triskaidekaphobia goes untreated in most cases. No s**t. If it’s really that bad where you take off every friday the 13th off work get some help I guess. Interestingly this fear causes an estimated loss of 8 to 9 HUNDRED MILLION Dollars in lost revenue each day it occurs, People don’t fly, they don’t travel, they don’t go to work and they don’t take monetary risks and they definitely do not get married.
This happens one to 3 times per year, never zero, and never 4 or more. Statistically there’s some fun stuff going on with the Gregorian calendar that makes this work. It operates on a 400 year cycle so the next time Friday the 13th is in October is next year isn’t that fun! So let’s see October 13th 1623, George look that up. Friday! Boom. neat if ultimately unhelpful information for your consumption. So some years that’s a cool 2.7 billion in losses because people are scared of a number. These ancient stories and religions have far more of an impact than many people like to give them credit for.
We have a myriad of hotels and skyscrapers missing the 13th floor, we have airports that don't have a 13th terminal, streets that don't have an address at 13, skipping it entirely or doing something dumb like 12 ½ in place of 13. Airlines and busses often won’t have 13th rows of seats. All these seem completely idiotic to me, because they’re obviously still there physically but the numbering labelling just skips them. Like what does that actually accomplish?
I guess one last thing the triskies would be butthurt if I didn’t mention is the notorious Apollo 13 mission where pretty much everything went wrong on the way to the moon. An oxygen tank exploded and they had to slingshot around and land back on earth manually. Could be a 13 curse, could be unrelated bad luck or faulty control limits and engineering checks or it could be a psyop to impress upon the american psyche that coming back to earth was possible using a slide rule to have a convenient answer to why apollo 11s computer would have never been technically capable of doing the telemetry calculations to get to the moon or earth at all. But that’s just ridiculous right? Maybe we’ll see in another episode.
All in all this stuff is pretty interesting and I never really gave it any thought besides the slasher movie franchise and a general cultural awareness of the phenomena. So it’s pretty neat to see where all of this might come from. I know a lot of people call it bad luck but I’m nothing short of thrilled for the future of the show hitting it’s 13th episode and I can’t wait to see what the fortune and future holds for it.