friday the 13th
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I have before me the abstract of a study published in the British Medical Journal in 1993, entitled "Is Friday the 13th Bad for Your Health?" With the aim of examining "the relation between health, behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United Kingdom," its authors compared the ratios of traffic volume to vehicular accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th, over a period of years.
Surprisingly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently fewer people chose to drive on Friday the 13th, the number of hospital admissions due to accidents was significantly higher than on "normal" Fridays.
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Their conclusion:
"Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended."
Paraskevidekatriaphobics — people afflicted with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th — must be pricking up their ears just now, buoyed by evidence that their fears may not be so irrational after all. However, it's unwise to take solace in a single scientific study (the only one of its kind, so far as I know), especially one so peculiar. I suspect it has more to teach us about human psychology than it does about any particular date on the calendar.
The sixth day of the week and the number 13 both have foreboding reputations dating from ancient folklore. Their inevitable conjunction from one to three times a year portends more misfortune than some credulous minds can bear. Folklorists say it's probably the most widespread superstition in America (and no doubt in other parts of the world, as well) — some people won't go to work on Friday the 13th; some won't eat in restaurants; many wouldn't think of setting a wedding on the date.
So, how many people at the turn of the millennium still suffer from this phobia? According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a therapist specializing in the treatment of phobias and credited with coining the term "paraskevidekatriaphobia," as many as 21 million do in the United States alone. If that figure is correct, something like eight percent of Americans are still in the grips of an old superstition.
Exactly how old is difficult to say, because tracking down the origins of superstitions is an imprecise science, at best. In fact, it's mostly guesswork -
It is said: If 13 people sit down to dinner together, all will die within the year. The Turks so disliked the number 13 that it was practically expunged from their vocabulary (Brewer, 1894). Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue.
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Many buildings don't have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the devil's luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters in their names).
Often enough, theories on the origins of folk beliefs come off sounding like vaporous flights of fancy themselves.
It has been proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the number 13 are as old as the act of counting. Primitive man had only his 10 fingers and two feet to represent units, so he could not count higher than 12. What lay beyond that — "13" — was an impenetrable, frightening mystery, thus a source of superstition.
Which has a lovely, didactic ring to it, but one is left wondering: Did primitive man not have toes?
In any case, despite whatever terrors the numerical unknown held for their primitive forebears, ancient civilizations were not unanimous in their dread of 13. The Chinese regarded the number as lucky, historians say, as did the Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs.
To the ancient Egyptians, life was a quest for spiritual ascension which unfolded in stages — 12 in this life and a thirteenth beyond, thought to be the eternal afterlife. The number 13 therefore symbolized death — not in terms of dust and decay, but as a glorious and desirable transformation. Egyptian civilization perished, this explanation continues, but the symbolism of the number 13 lived on only to be corrupted by other cultures (the Romans, for example) and bound to a fear of death instead of a reverence for the afterlife. (In Tarot decks, the Death card bears the number 13 but still, as typically interpreted, retains its original, more positive meaning: transformation.)
Another theory suggests the number 13 was purposely vilified by the priests of patriarchal religions because it represented femininity. Thirteen was allegedly revered in prehistoric goddess-worshipping cultures because it corresponded to the number of lunar (menstrual) cycles in a year (13 x 28 = 364 days). The "Earth Mother of Laussel," for example, a 27,000-year-old carving found near the Lascaux caves in France and often cited as an icon of matriarchal spirituality, depicts a female figure holding a cresent-shaped horn bearing 13 notches. According to this explanation, as the solar calendar triumphed over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated civilization, so did the number 12 over the number 13, which became anathema.
One of the more concrete early taboos connected with the number 13 — a taboo some still subscribe to today, apparently — is said to have originated with the Hindus, who believed, for reasons I haven't been able to ascertain, that it is always unlucky for 13 people to gather in one place — say, at dinner. Interestingly enough, exactly the same superstition has been attributed to the ancient Vikings, though many scholars regard this and the accompanying mythological explanation as apocryphal. Be that as it may, the story has been told as follows:
Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the Evil One, god of mischief, had been excluded from the guest list but crashed the party anyway, bringing the total number of attendees to 13. True to character, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind god of winter, to attack Balder the Good, who was a favorite of the gods. -
Hod took a spear of mistletoe offered by Loki and hurled it at Balder, killing him instantly. All Valhalla grieved. And although one might take the moral of this story to be "Beware of uninvited guests bearing mistletoe," the Norse themselves apparently concluded that 13 people at a dinner party is just plain bad luck.
As if to prove the point, the Bible tells us there were exactly 13 present at the Last Supper.
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One of the dinner guests — er, apostles — betrayed Jesus Christ, setting the stage for the crucifixion.
Did I mention the crucifixion took place on a Friday?
Bad Friday
It is said: Never change your bed on Friday; it will bring bad dreams. Don't start a trip on Friday or you will have misfortune. If you cut your nails on Friday, you cut them for sorrow. Ships that set sail on a Friday will have bad luck – as in the tale of H.M.S. Friday ... One hundred years ago, the British government sought to quell once and for all the widespread superstition among seamen that setting sail on Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned, named "H.M.S. Friday." They laid her keel on a Friday, launched her on a Friday, selected her crew on a Friday and hired a man named Jim Friday to be her captain. To top it off, H.M.S. Friday embarked on her maiden voyage on a Friday, and was never seen or heard from again.
You could say Friday's bad reputation goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. It was on a Friday, supposedly, that Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned in Sunday School, and they were both ejected from Paradise. Tradition also holds that the Great Flood began on a Friday; God tongue-tied the builders of the Tower of Babel on a Friday; the Temple of Solomon was destroyed on a Friday; and Friday was the day of the week on which Christ was crucified. It is a traditionally a day of penance for Christians.
In ancient Rome, Friday was execution day (later Hangman's Day in Britain). In other pagan cultures it was the sabbath, a day of worship. Those who indulged in secular or self-interested activities on that day could not expect to receive blessings from the gods — which may explain the lingering taboo on embarking on journeys or starting important projects on Fridays.
To complicate matters, these pagan associations were not lost on the early Church, which went to great lengths to suppress them. If Friday was a holy day for heathens, it must not be so for Christians — thus it became known in the Middle Ages as the "Witches' Sabbath," and thereby hangs another tale.
The name "Friday" came from a Norse deity worshipped on the sixth day, known either as Frigg (goddess of marriage and fertility), or Freya (goddess of sex and fertility), or both, the two having become confused with one another over time (the etymology of "Friday" is given both ways, depending on the source). Frigg and/or Freya correspond to Venus, goddess of love of the Romans, who called the sixth day of the week "dies Veneris."
Friday was actually considered quite lucky by pre-Christian Teutonic peoples — especially as a day to get married — because of its traditional association with love and fertility. All that changed when Christianity came along. The goddess of the sixth day — most likely Freya in this context, given that the cat was her sacred animal — was recast in folklore as a witch, and her day became associated with evil doings.
Various legends developed in that vein, but one is of particular interest: As the story goes, the witches of the north used to observe their sabbath by gathering in a cemetery in the dark of the moon. On one such occasion, the witch-goddess, Freya herself, came down from her sanctuary in the mountaintops and appeared before the group of witches, who numbered just 12 at the time, and gave them one of her cats, making it ever afterward a coven of 13. -
The astute reader will have noted that while we have thus far insinuated any number of possible connections between events, practices and beliefs attributed to ancient times and the superstitious fear of Fridays and the number 13, we have yet to explain how, why or when these separate strands of folklore converged — if that is indeed what happened — to mark Friday the 13th as the unluckiest day of all.
There's a very simple reason for that: nobody knows.
One theory holds that it came about not as the result of a convergence but a catastrophe, a single historical event that happened nearly 700 years ago.
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The catastrophe was the decimation of the Knights Templar, the Catholic order of "warrier monks" formed during the Christian Crusades to combat Islam. They were renowned as a fighting force for 200 years, but by the 1300s the order had grown so large and powerful it was perceived as a political threat by kings and popes alike and was brought down by a Church-state conspiracy, as recounted by Katharine Kurtz in "Tales of the Knights Templar" (Warner Books: 1995):
"On October 13, 1307, a day so infamous that Friday the 13th would become a synonym for ill fortune, officers of King Philip IV of France carried out mass arrests in a well-coordinated dawn raid that left several thousand Templars — knights, sergeants, priests, and serving brethren — in chains, charged with heresy, blasphemy, various obscenities, and homosexual practices. None of these charges was ever proven, even in France — and the Order was found innocent elsewhere — but in the seven years following the arrests, hundreds of Templars suffered excruciating tortures intended to force 'confessions,' and more than a hundred died under torture or were executed by burning at the stake."
There are drawbacks to the "day so infamous" thesis, not the least of which is that it attributes great cultural significance to a relatively obscure historical event. Even more problematic — for this or any other theory positing premodern origins for Friday the 13th superstitions — is the fact that no one has been able to document the existence of such beliefs prior to the 19th century. If people who lived before the late 1800s perceived Friday the 13th as a harbinger of misfortune, there is no evidence remaining to prove it. Some scholars believe it was a thoroughly modern invention, exacerbated by 20th century media hype.
Friday the 13th doesn't even merit a mention in E. Cobham Brewer's voluminous 1898 edition of the "Dictionary of Phrase and Fable," though one does find entries for "Friday, an Unlucky Day" and "Thirteen Unlucky." When the date of ill fate finally does make an appearance in 20th century editions of the text, it is without extravagant claims as to its historicity or longevity. The very brevity of the entry is instructive: "A particularly unlucky Friday. See Thirteen." It implies that the heightened misfortune attributed to Friday the 13th can be accounted for by an accrual of bad omens. -
If that's the case, then we're guilty of a misnomer for labeling Friday the 13th "the unluckiest day" — a characterization better reserved for, say, a Friday the 13th on which one breaks a mirror, walks under a ladder and spies a black cat crossing one's path — a day, if there ever was one, best spent in the safety of one's home with the doors locked and shutters closed.
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something very scary happened to me today......
two customers ran away without paying n i will have to make up 4 e difference from my pocket.... scary huh? -
Love fridays~
Considering that friday means sat and sun is next on the list
time to rest
besides haven't I heard somewhere that friday is considered the day of love...?
Friday the 13th is coolz mah... Since it's pretty neventful or usually pretty lucky for me So... 
Oh btw, it's almost fullmoon tonight lehz
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Originally posted by harryryan:something very scary happened to me today......
two customers ran away without paying n i will have to make up 4 e difference from my pocket.... scary huh?
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Maybe that's why most HDB flats stop at the 12th floor?
just speculating...
BTW you guys noticed that there is a "ba gua" on every one dollar coin?...supposedly that is for fengshui...almost everyone is carrying a one dollar coin rite now... -
so suay dun u think?of all e 3 months plus i work here first time this happens n it's on Friday e 13Originally posted by PaJeRoMiNi Ver 1.0: -
poor thing dude....and it has to happen today...Originally posted by harryryan:so suay dun u think?of all e 3 months plus i work here first time this happens n it's on Friday e 13
be more careful the next time,ya?