Friday the 13th, or the Marriage of Two Fears
2026-11-13
The Last Supper, engraving by Raffaello Morghen after Leonardo da Vinci: Christ seated at the centre of a long table with twelve apostles grouped in threes
The Last Supper, engraving by Raffaello Morghen after Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1800. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
Friday the 13th looks ancient: a curse said to run back through the Templars and the Last Supper to the Norse gods. The paper trail tells a different story. Thirteen and Friday were each feared separately for centuries, but the day that joins them is a child of the nineteenth century, raised by newspapers, dinner clubs, a Wall Street novel and Hollywood.
“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 on Friday 13th of November he passed away.”
— Henry Sutherland Edwards, The Life of Rossini (1869)
On 13 November 2026 the calendar will hand us another Friday the 13th, and the usual company will come out to meet it. Hotels without a thirteenth floor. A pilot who will not fly. A cousin who stays in bed. And, somewhere online, the story everyone seems to know: the day has been cursed since the Knights Templar were seized at dawn in 1307, or since Judas sat down as the thirteenth man at the table, or since Loki crashed a feast of the gods in Valhalla.
It is a good story, and it is old in the way a good story feels old. Look for its documents and it gets much younger.
Friday the 13th is not an ancient curse but a modern marriage: two old, separate fears that were only joined in the nineteenth century, and then given a false pedigree reaching back to Golgotha, Asgard and the Temple.
What follows is an attempt to separate the bride from the groom, and both from the family tree invented for them afterwards.
The first thing a historian notices is that the superstition is made of two parts, and each part has its own history.
One is the number thirteen, feared mostly as a number of guests at a table. The other is Friday, feared as a day on which to start anything: a voyage, a marriage, a job, a harvest. For most of European history these two beliefs lived in different houses. A sailor might refuse to sail on a Friday without giving any thought to the date. A hostess might dread thirteen at dinner on a Tuesday.
The thing we now call Friday the 13th happens when the two are brought together, and that, as we will see, can be dated.
Before that, each fear has to be followed on its own.
[](#i-thirteen-at-table "Jump to this heading")I. Thirteen at Table
The most persistent form of the fear of thirteen is domestic. Thirteen people sit down to eat, and within the year one of them dies. Hostesses invited a fourteenth guest at the last minute, or set an extra place, to break the count.
The Christian explanation is the one that comes most easily: the Last Supper. Christ and the twelve apostles made thirteen at the table, and one of the thirteen was the traitor. Within a day the host was dead. The image is powerful, and Leonardo’s composition, copied in countless engravings like Morghen’s above, put that crowded table on the walls of half of Europe.
But note what this explains and what it does not. It explains a fear of thirteen at a meal. It says nothing about the thirteenth of a month. The Gospels do not count the diners as a warning, and nothing in Christian liturgy treats the number as cursed. The superstition grew up beside the story, as popular interpretation, not as doctrine.
Numerologists offer a second, more abstract account. Twelve is the number of completeness: twelve months, twelve signs of the zodiac, twelve tribes, twelve apostles, twelve hours of day and of night. Thirteen is the one that spills over the edge of a finished order. That is a fine reading after the fact. It does not show that anyone feared thirteen for that reason.
[](#ii-loki-the-uninvited-guest "Jump to this heading")II. Loki, the Uninvited Guest
The second ancestor usually claimed for thirteen is Norse. Twelve gods were feasting in Valhalla, the story goes. Loki, the trickster, arrived uninvited as the thirteenth, and he tricked the blind god Höðr into killing Baldr, the most beloved of the gods, with a dart of mistletoe. From that thirteenth guest came darkness on the world, and the number has been unlucky ever since.
The death of Baldr is real mythology. It is told by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda, written in Iceland around 1220, in the section called Gylfaginning. There Frigg takes an oath from every thing in the world not to harm her son, except the young mistletoe, which seemed too small to matter. The gods amuse themselves by throwing weapons at the invulnerable Baldr. Loki puts a mistletoe shaft in Höðr’s hand, guides his aim, and Baldr falls.
What Snorri does not tell is the feast of twelve, or the thirteenth guest.
Read the chapter and you will find no dinner, no count of diners, no number at all. The scene is an outdoor game at the assembly of the gods. The “thirteenth guest” version is a modern retelling, assembled to give the fear of thirteen a pagan root. The folklorists of the Library of Congress list it, together with the Templars, among the origin stories that appear only in the late twentieth century: folklore about folklore.
Illustration from an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript showing the death of Baldr, with figures around the fallen god
The death of Baldr, from the Icelandic manuscript SÁM 66, illustrated by Jakob Sigurðsson, 1765–1766. Árni Magnússon Institute, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Loki has done many things in his long career. Counting guests was not one of them.
[](#iii-the-trouble-with-friday "Jump to this heading")III. The Trouble with Friday
Friday’s bad name is older and better documented, and here the Christian root is real. Friday was the day of the Crucifixion, and for centuries it was a day of fasting and penance. A day of mourning is a poor day for beginnings.
By the late fourteenth century the idea had already reached English poetry. In Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, when the fox seizes Chauntecleer the cock, the narrator laments that “on a Friday fell all this mischance.” Chaucer is joking, as he usually is, but a joke only works if the audience already knows the belief.
The belief really took shape in the early modern period. Collectors of folklore found Friday named again and again as a bad day to set sail, to marry, to move house, to begin a job, or to be born. Fishermen were among its most faithful keepers. None of this has anything to do with the thirteenth of the month. A sailor feared every Friday, all fifty-two of them.
[](#iv-hangmans-day "Jump to this heading")IV. Hangman’s Day
In the United States Friday picked up a darker nickname.
Through the nineteenth century, many American states carried out executions on Fridays, and the day became known as “hangman’s day.” The custom gave the old Christian dislike of Friday a grim new reason. Work begun on the day of the gallows, people said, would never be finished. In 1840 the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay wrote that he would delay a journey to Richmond until Friday, “altho’ I don’t like that hangman’s day.”
Historians of crime point out that this was a distinctly American variant. In the 1860s some state governors moved executions to other weekdays on purpose, partly to weaken the superstition. The newspapers applauded them for wiping “hangman’s day” off the calendar.
So by the middle of the nineteenth century the bad Friday was everywhere. The bad thirteen was everywhere. They had not yet met.
[](#v-where-the-two-fears-meet "Jump to this heading")V. Where the Two Fears Meet
The earliest clear references to an unlucky Friday the 13th that folklorists have found are French, and they date from 1834.
In the Revue de Paris that year the Marquis de Salvo, telling the story of a Sicilian count who killed his daughter on a Friday the 13th, exclaimed: “It is always these Fridays and these numbers thirteen that bring bad luck!” The same year a comic play, Les Finesses des Gribouilles, gave a character the line: “I was born on a Friday, 13 December 1813, from which come all my misfortunes.”
Even these are a little ambiguous. The first may name two separate omens that happened to coincide. The second may be about one particular day rather than every Friday that falls on the thirteenth. But they show the two ideas beginning to touch, and by the middle of the century the combined belief seems to have been common in France.
The best-known early reference in English comes from music. Gioachino Rossini died in Paris on Friday, 13 November 1868. In his Life of Rossini, published the next year, Henry Sutherland Edwards wrote the sentence that stands at the head of this essay: if the composer, “like so many Italians,” thought Fridays unlucky and thirteen an unlucky number, it was remarkable that he died on a Friday the 13th.
Read it closely. Edwards does not say that Friday the 13th was a known evil day. He says that two separate omens, each feared on its own, happened to meet on the date of a famous death, and he finds that remarkable. That is exactly what one would expect to read before the combined superstition had settled in English.
[](#vi-the-club-that-dined-at-thirteen "Jump to this heading")VI. The Club That Dined at Thirteen
The next witnesses are the people who set out to mock the superstition, and in doing so helped advertise it.
In New York, Captain William Fowler, a Civil War veteran, founded the Thirteen Club, devoted to breaking every taboo of luck at once. Its first dinner, for thirteen people, was held on Friday, 13 January 1882. Members walked under ladders on their way in, spilled salt on purpose, and sat thirteen to a table, then reported cheerfully the next year that no one had died. The club grew to hundreds of members, and newspapers loved it.
Menu card of a Thirteen Club dinner in New York, 1899
Menu of a Thirteen Club dinner, New York, 12 January 1899. New York Public Library menu collection, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Notice the logic. You only found a club to defy a taboo if the taboo exists. The Thirteen Club shows that the fear of thirteen at table, the fear of Friday, and the habit of linking them were all familiar to New Yorkers in the 1880s, even if the club’s main target was the number rather than the date.
By the 1890s, the Library of Congress folklorists note, American newspapers had a standing joke: whenever a baseball game was scheduled for Friday the 13th, someone remarked that the date was surely bad news for one of the teams. Which, of course, it was.
[](#vii-the-novel-that-spread-it "Jump to this heading")VII. The Novel That Spread It
In 1907 the Boston financier Thomas W. Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth. Its plot is a stock-market panic: an unscrupulous broker exploits the superstition to break the market on the feared day.
The book is often named as the origin of the superstition. It cannot be. Lawson’s characters already believe in it. They call the date “the Wall Street hoodoo-day, Friday, the thirteenth of the month,” treat it as a tradition, and gossip about traders too frightened to eat. A novel that depends on its readers recognising a belief did not invent the belief.
What Lawson did was spread it. The book sold well, and in 1916 it was made into a silent film. The odd footnote everyone enjoys is that a seven-masted schooner named after Lawson, the Thomas W. Lawson, was wrecked off the coast of Britain in December 1907, the same year the novel appeared.
From here on, the newspapers take over. References to Friday the 13th, rare before the turn of the century, become constant in the twentieth.
[](#viii-the-templars-a-late-ancestor "Jump to this heading")VIII. The Templars, a Late Ancestor
That brings us to the most popular origin story of all.
At dawn on Friday, 13 October 1307, the officers of King Philip IV of France arrested the Knights Templar across the kingdom. The date is real; the weekday checks out. The charges that followed were heresy, idolatry and obscene initiation rites, extracted under torture. Pope Clement V suppressed the order in 1312, and in 1314 the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in Paris.
Medieval miniature showing Templars being burned at the stake outside a city while onlookers watch
The burning of Templars, from the Chroniques de France ou de St Denis, workshop of the Virgil Master, after 1380. British Library, Royal MS 20 C VII, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
It is a perfect origin for a curse. It is also one that no one seems to have proposed until the twentieth century.
There is no medieval or early modern record treating Friday the 13th as unlucky because of the Templars. Most people in the Middle Ages would not have known the exact date of the arrests. The order was not much loved by ordinary people, so there was no obvious reason to mourn its fall as a disaster. And widespread fascination with the Templars only began in the eighteenth century, when Freemasons and romantic writers started to adopt them as mystical ancestors.
The link was then popularised very late. John J. Robinson’s Born in Blood (1989) helped, and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) put the story in the mouth of its hero and in front of tens of millions of readers. Today it is probably the explanation most people would give.
It is the same process that turned the Templars’ supposed idol into a goat-headed devil they never actually worshipped. I traced that one in Baphomet, or the Goat That Never Entered the Lodge. The Templars are history’s favourite blank page. Whatever the age needs, it writes there.
Baphomet, or the Goat That Never Entered the Lodge
[](#ix-names-for-a-fear "Jump to this heading")IX. Names for a Fear
Every modern fear eventually gets a Greek name, and this one has two.
Triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number thirteen, appears in print in 1910, in the psychiatrist Isador Coriat’s Abnormal Psychology. It reached the general press much later.
Paraskevidekatriaphobia, fear of Friday the 13th specifically, was coined in the early 1990s by the American therapist Donald Dossey, who specialised in stress and phobias. A classicist would wince at it: Dossey used the modern Greek words for Friday (_Paraskevi_, the day of “preparation”) and for thirteen (_dekatria_). Its very form gives away its age.
There is a small irony for those who fear the date. In the Gregorian calendar, the 13th of the month falls on a Friday slightly more often than on any other day of the week. The calendar has a weakness for the very day we dread.
[](#x-apollo-13 "Jump to this heading")X. Apollo 13
No modern story has done more for the reputation of thirteen than Apollo 13, and so its facts deserve care.
The mission launched on Saturday, 11 April 1970, at 1:13 p.m. Houston time, which on a 24-hour clock reads 13:13. About fifty-six hours into the flight, on the evening of Monday, 13 April, oxygen tank No. 2 in the service module exploded. The lunar landing was abandoned, and the crew, James Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise, used the lunar module as a lifeboat, swung around the Moon and came home safely on 17 April.
Notice which day it was. The explosion happened on the 13th, but on a Monday, not a Friday.
And the cause had nothing to do with numbers. NASA’s review board traced it to a chain of ordinary engineering errors: heater switches never upgraded when the permitted voltage was raised, and a tank damaged during ground tests. The thirteens are real coincidences, and the folklore enjoys them. The investigation found wiring.
[](#xi-other-countries-other-numbers "Jump to this heading")XI. Other Countries, Other Numbers
The Western fear of thirteen is not universal, and a look abroad is the best cure for thinking of it as natural.
In Italy the unlucky date is traditionally Friday the 17th, not the 13th. The usual explanation is visual: written in Roman numerals, 17 is XVII, and its letters can be rearranged into VIXI, Latin for “I have lived,” which is to say, “I am dead.” In Italian popular tradition thirteen has often been considered a lucky number, though American films have been teaching Italians to fear it too.
In the Spanish- and Greek-speaking worlds the bad day is Tuesday the 13th. In East Asia the feared number is four, because in Chinese, Japanese and Korean it sounds like the word for death, and many buildings there skip the fourth floor as Western ones skip the thirteenth.
Bad luck, it seems, is real everywhere. Only the address changes.
[](#xii-the-card-without-a-name "Jump to this heading")XII. The Card Without a Name
Thirteen also has a place in the occult, and here the important thing is not to mix the traditions.
In the tarot, card XIII of the Major Arcana is Death. In many old Tarot de Marseille decks the card carries its number but no title, which is why French writers called it l’arcane sans nom, the nameless trump. In the Rider–Waite deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909, Death rides a white horse under a black banner with a white rose, while a king falls and a child and a bishop wait.
Card XIII, Death, from the Rider-Waite tarot: a skeleton in armour on a white horse carrying a black banner with a white rose
Death, card XIII of the Rider–Waite tarot, designed by Pamela Colman Smith under A. E. Waite, 1909. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Arthur Edward Waite, who designed the deck’s programme, was direct about it. Describing the traditional image in The Key to the Tarot (1910), he wrote: “The transparent and unescapable meaning is death, but the alternatives allocated to the symbol are change and transformation.”
That is the reading modern tarot readers almost always give: an ending that clears the ground, not a literal death. It is a thirteen of a very different kind from the hostess’s thirteen at dinner. It belongs to the symbolic system of a deck that runs from 0 to XXI, where XIII simply falls between the Hanged Man and Temperance. It does not explain the superstition of the date, and the date does not explain it.
Two thirteens, two traditions. It is worth keeping them apart.
[](#xiii-hollywood-takes-the-date "Jump to this heading")XIII. Hollywood Takes the Date
The last step belonged to the cinema.
On 9 May 1980 Paramount released Friday the 13th, produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham from a script by Victor Miller. It was a low-budget slasher set at a summer camp on Crystal Lake, and it was a hit. The murderer of the first film is not even Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked figure everyone now remembers. He arrives properly in the sequels.
The franchise went on to twelve films, a television series, comics and games. More than any novel or newspaper, it fixed the date in world imagination. For most people alive today, Friday the 13th has a face, and the face wears a mask.
[](#xiv-five-strange-films-for-a-strange-day "Jump to this heading")XIV. Five Strange Films for a Strange Day
For anyone planning to spend 13 November on the sofa, here is a short and not very solemn programme.
I. Friday the Thirteenth (1933), directed by Victor Saville. A British drama that follows several passengers in the hours before a bus crash. Very English: the doom arrives on public transport.
II. 13 Ghosts (1960), directed by William Castle. An American family inherits a haunted house, and audiences were handed a coloured “ghost viewer” to see the spirits or hide from them. Twelve ghosts on arrival; the thirteenth is the plot.
III. Jason X (2001), directed by James Isaac. The franchise’s one representative here: Jason is frozen, thawed in the twenty-fifth century and set loose on a spaceship. When a monster has exhausted every summer camp on Earth, there is only space left.
IV. 13 Tzameti (2005), directed by Géla Babluani. A French thriller in black and white by a Georgian director, whose title is simply the Georgian word for thirteen. A poor young man steals an envelope meant for someone else and becomes number 13 in a game no one should enter. A lesson in reading other people’s mail.
V. 13 Sins (2014), directed by Daniel Stamm. An American remake of the Thai 13: Game of Death: a man in debt is offered money by phone for thirteen tasks, each worse than the last. Proof that the number does not need a Friday to be bad company.
[](#xv-the-marriage-and-its-pedigree "Jump to this heading")XV. The Marriage and Its Pedigree
Put the documents in order and the story is clear.
A fear of thirteen at the table, attached to the Last Supper and much later to a Norse feast that Snorri never described. A fear of Friday, rooted in the Crucifixion, already a joke in Chaucer, darkened in America by the gallows. The two meet in France around 1834, appear in English beside Rossini’s deathbed in 1869, are mocked by the Thirteen Club from 1882, are traded on Wall Street in Lawson’s novel of 1907, and are finally given a mask in 1980. The Templars arrive last of all, in the late twentieth century, as an ancestor adopted after the fact.
None of this makes the fear foolish. Superstitions are how people handle the part of life they cannot control, and a date that arrives once or twice a year, carrying a little dread, is a mild price for the illusion that bad luck keeps a calendar. But it is worth knowing what we are actually afraid of.
Friday the 13th is not an ancient curse but a modern marriage: two old, separate fears joined in the nineteenth century, then fitted with a pedigree reaching back to Golgotha, Asgard and the Temple. The pedigree is invented. The marriage is real. And like most marriages, it has lasted mainly because people keep celebrating the anniversary.
--
Chamber of Reflections
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