Friday the 13th, a myth, legend or true? On Friday, Oct 13, 1307, under the order of King Philip IV of France, a group of Templar Knights were captured & taken to a Holy Inquisition to be tried & convicted for alleged crimes against Christianity.
That Philip IV’s goons moved on the Knights Templar on that date is true. That that date was a Friday is also true.
What is absolutely not true is that this is in any way the origin of the superstition of Friday 13 being unlucky.
Friday - any and every Friday - had been considered unlucky in Britain for centuries. People thought it highly unwise to start any venture or do any major task on a Friday - a journey, building a ship or house, signing a contract, getting married, planting next year’s crops - for fear of hexing it. Gaelic-speaking Scots thought it was unlucky even to say the name of the day aloud.
Similarly, the number 13 has been considered unlucky in many cultures, long before the Last Supper: it is the ‘perfect’ number of 12 spoilt by an extra which makes it impossible to distribute tidily.
But these separate superstitions only came together toward the end of the 19th century, in specifically urban western culture. The pace of modern industrial life made it intolerable to have 52 days of the year when nothing significant could be begun or agreed, so the idea grew up that it was only Fridays that were also the 13th of the month that were really dodgy - thus freeing up nearly 50 more days a year for business. So far from being a relic of the Middle Ages, the superstition of “Friday 13th” was actually a streamlined, modern superstition for the imminent 20th century!
And as far as I know it was only quite late in the 20th century that anyone noticed that 13 October 1307 was a Friday, and jumped ignorantly to the conclusion that this was the origin of the superstition that they knew.
I assume the question is about the idea that Friday 13th is unlucky.
In every year there are one or two days that are Friday 13th and hence it is inevitable that over the long course of history bad stuff has sometimes happened - you could no doubt take any other combination of day and date and find equally bad events over a thousand years or so of recorded history.
Logically there is obviously no causal relationship between the regular fall of the calendar and unfortunate events occurring. Indeed, if you can only come up with one example from 714 years ago, then it sounds as though it may not be a bad day at all to go risk-taking!
AFAIK it is a longstanding myth about a day of bad luck. It is certainly not a “fact” except to the extent that credulous people who believe something bad is going to happen are slightly more likely to encounter something they interpret as bad.
My guess - and that’s all it is - is that it goes back to the origins of Christianity. Friday is the day that Christ was crucified, and 13 would be the count of Jesus and his twelve disciples present at the Last Supper. But even if this surmise is correct it tells us nothing about when these Biblical stories merged into a single superstition, except that it was presumably in Christendom (mostly Europe) and within the last two thousand years.
https://www.quora.com/
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