This could be your lucky day
By Bill Duncan
For the second time in 2006 those of us who suffer paraskevidekatriaphobia must prepare to face another dreaded Friday the thirteenth.
If you are wondering, I don’t really suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia, the pathological fear of Friday the 13th. I just wanted to see the computer spell checker go into a panic over such a word. It did.
But this Friday is Friday the thirteenth as it was back in January of this year. Twice in one year isn’t really that rare. It happened in 2001, 2002, 2004 and will happen in April and July of 2007, but look out come 2009. Friday the 13th shows up in February, March and November.
Psychologists tell us that people who actually fear Friday the 13th, heighten the chances of having accidents or falling ill or having a streak of bad luck on that day because of their own anxiety. According to the Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, this fear causes an estimated $900 million loss of business each Friday 13th because people will not travel, not even to their jobs.
Whether you subscribe to the superstition of bad luck on this particular day or not, Friday the 13th is considered the unluckiest of days, unless you were born on Friday the 13th — then, according to that same superstition it is your lucky day.
Go figure.
Friday itself is the fodder for many superstitions. One of the best known is that Eve tempted Adam with the apple on a Friday. Tradition also has it that the Biblical Flood, the confusion at the Tower of Babel, and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ all took place on a Friday.
Long before the Bible was written, Friday was considered an important day. Primitive people set aside Fridays as a special time to worship their gods and ask them for good crops, health and happiness. These "primitive" folks had a rather more fluid conception of the year than we do and their calendar was based on the cycles of the moon.
It sophisticated folks like us who created the Gregorian calendar, which follows a pattern of leap years that repeat every 400 years. For those who worry about the number 13, that date only occurs 4,800 times in 400 years, however to add a furrow to the brow, the 13th of the month is slightly more likely to be on a Friday and any other day.
The number 13 has played an important role in history. We know, for example, there are approximately 13 lunations in our solar year, so the year of the seasons had thirteen months in the ancient calendar. Mathematically we know if we divide the number of days in the year by 28, the number of days in a woman’s menstrual cycle, again we get the number 13.
Somehow out of all this came the superstition that 13 had to be an unlucky number particularly when the theorist added in that Jesus at his last supper sat down to eat with his twelve disciples, making thirteen at the table. Friday 13th is thus considered to be especially unlucky when it falls on Good Friday.
The trouble with superstitions is that the theorists go searching for every probable no matter how remote. For example the ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon mission is now in the 13 bad luck category because it was launched at 1313 hours Houston time, from pad 39 (13×3) and had to be aborted on April 13, 1970.
Friday itself used to be the seventh day of the week. It was the Sabbath in the Jewish lunar calendar and is still the Sabbath for the Moslems.
For most of us, it is just the end of a work week, unless you are a freelance writer, or a farmer. Then it is just another day.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)