Friday the 13th

    • 5420 posts
    July 13, 2012 5:00 AM PDT
    Just realized it was Friday the 13th!!!

    And it is my stepson's birthday who was actually born on a Friday the 13th...



    Where did all the hooppla about Friday the 13th start???

    According to folklorists, there is no written evidence for a "Friday the 13th" superstition before the 19th century. The earliest known documented reference in English occurs in Henry Sutherland Edwards' 1869 biography of Gioachino Rossini, who died on a Friday 13th.

    He [Rossini] was surrounded to the last by admiring friends; and if it be true that, like so many Italians, he regarded Fridays as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that one Friday 13th of November he died.

    Several theories have been proposed about the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition.

    One theory states that it is a modern amalgamation of two older superstitions: that thirteen is an unlucky number and that Friday is an unlucky day.

    In numerology, the number twelve is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in the twelve months of the year, twelve hours of the clock, twelve gods of Olympus, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Apostles of Jesus, the 12 successors of Muhammad in Shia Islam, etc., whereas the number thirteen was considered irregular, transgressing this completeness. There is also a superstition, thought by some to derive from the Last Supper or a Norse myth, that having thirteen people seated at a table will result in the death of one of the diners.

    Friday has been considered an unlucky day at least since the 14th century's The Canterbury Tales, and many other professions have regarded Friday as an unlucky day to undertake journeys or begin new projects.

    One author, noting that references are all but nonexistent before 1907 but frequently seen thereafter, has argued that its popularity derives from the publication that year of Thomas W. Lawson's popular novel Friday, the Thirteenth, in which an unscrupulous broker takes advantage of the superstition to create a Wall Street panic on a Friday the 13th.

    Records of the superstition are rarely found before the 20th century, when it became extremely common. The connection between the Friday the 13th superstition and the Knights Templar was popularized in Dan Brown's 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code and in John J. Robinson's 1989 work Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry. On Friday, 13 October 1307, hundreds of the Knights Templar were arrested in France, an action apparently motivated financially and undertaken by the efficient royal bureaucracy to increase the prestige of the crown. Philip IV was the force behind this ruthless move, but it has also tarnished the historical reputation of Clement V. From the very day of Clement V's coronation, the king falsely charged the Templars with heresy, immorality and abuses, and the scruples of the Pope were compromised by a growing sense that the burgeoning French State might not wait for the Church, but would proceed independently. It was on Friday the 13th that Leann and Amy were born and killed, at the age of 13.However, experts agree that this is a relatively recent correlation, and most likely a modern-day invention.

    • 2685 posts
    July 13, 2012 5:20 AM PDT
    You mean it didn't start in 1980 with Jason Vorhees? 8^)
    • Moderator
    • 19067 posts
    July 13, 2012 9:20 AM PDT
    It is my son's birthday too (which was also a Friday).
    • 601 posts
    July 13, 2012 11:32 AM PDT
    I know a guy who will not get out of bed on Friday 13th...tough as nails, will back down from nothing, but is paranoid about this date !! nothing queer as folk.
  • July 21, 2012 11:50 PM PDT
     
    • 9 posts
    July 22, 2012 8:30 AM PDT
    Lucky...didn't you read my posts, a few months back, about this very subject. I'll go look, and see if I can "refresh" the topic, for ya...lol (if ya want, that is)

    Ride Free
    Tweek