Triskaidekaphobia and Superstition—A Murfin Rant

         Friday the Thirteenth mumbo jumbo.

I have never been superstitious and have often been condescending to those who are—cue Stevie Wonder.  That is, of course, if you discount the two years in my boyhood when I carried a rabbit foot key chain in my jeans pockets until all the hair wore off and I was left with a weird, mummified paw with surprisingly sharp nails.  But I outgrew that phase.  Later in my militant atheist literally piss-on-churches youth I lumped religion with superstition and went around muttering about mystric-tristic bullshit.  I rolled my eyes at my hippie friends who got into New Age crap—crystals and pyramids, Tarot, I Ching, and Ouija boards.

These are the results you get when you conduct your superstition survey on 9/11.  Just saying.

I try to be more tolerant now, but I still get the hives when I read that more Americans believe in angels and demons than in man-made climate change.  There are a lot of credulous folks out there who are apt to take what they see on some History Channel hype and hokum as gospel truth.

Triskaidekaphobia—Fear of Friday the 13th—is a classic superstition.  Most folks don’t know what is supposed to be unfortunate about the day, but they dread it anyway.  Some even think it’s about that slasher from fictional Crystal Lake.

Despite its wide-spread acknowledgement, apparently 13th day of the month falling on a Friday thing is not even that old of a tradition.  Apparently the Greeks and others regarded Fridays as unlucky because it was the day of the crucifixion.  Some numerologists considered 13 unfortunate for convoluted mathematical reasons and because it was said that there were 13 present at the Last Supper on the 13th day of the Jewish month Nisan considered by Christians as Maundy Thursday, the eve of the crucifixion.    But these two dreads were not put together until the 19th Century.

Yet for whatever reason by the closing decades of the 1800s Friday the 13th was entrenched in popular culture.  The wide-spread story that it was the date in 1307 that Philip IV of France arrested hundreds of the Knights Templar leading to their torture and execution was made up out of whole cloth in a popular novel and boosted more recently in Dan Brown’s idiotic thriller The Da Vinci Code. 

Who can argue with dead teenagers at Crystal Lake.

And, of course, there were all of those dead teenagers at that summer camp.