Friday The 13th: Origins and Witchcraft Associations
For spooky people everywhere, Friday the 13th has taken on the life of a holiday. Parties, tattoo specials, horror movies, and mostly around the belief that Friday is either lucky or unlucky. There’s no 13th floor in buildings, 13th aisle on airplanes. It’s Taylor Swift’s famously lucky number, yet there’s still a phobia, triskaidekaphobia, named for people who are afraid of the number 13. So which is it? And why is it associated with witches??
Friday the 13th’s exact unlucky origins are unclear.
In modern times, Friday the 13th is often associated with the movie, Friday the 13th. And honestly, it has nothing to do with the number, the day or witches and more so to do with frisky teens who aren’t attending to their summer camp jobs.
Modern witchcraft has really reclaimed the number 13 from its unlucky origins and associations with witches. In the 50s and 60s with the rise of Wicca and paganism up to now, many believe that 13 was the ideal number of coven members, likely because of the sort of 13 (its like 12 and some fractions or something) lunar phases in a year.
The association with witchcraft and Friday the 13th is also sort of unclear. Some believe it has to do with the witch trials when some were forced to “confess” that they met with their covens on Good Friday as like an insult to the puritans or something.
Some believe that Friday the 13’s unlucky origins have to do with the knight’s Templar and the day they were arrested, an idea that many were exposed to because of the da Vinci code, but that particular day wasn’t really seen as “unlucky” until much later in history.
A lot of people seem to agree that 13 is unlucky because of the Christian faith and story of the 13 people sitting at the last supper of Jesus. So those could be reasons why the superstition of Friday the 13th in particular is “unlucky” unless of course you’re a witch. An older and eerily similar story is one I found about Norse mythology where a dinner party of 12 norse gods is crashed by the 13th god, the trickster Loki, who ultimately causes Baldur’s death. Whether or not either of these are true, both Christianity and Norse folklore are occasionally seen to hold superstitions about it being fatally unlucky for there to be 13 people at any dinner party.
Going further back, one of the oldest possible reasons why 13 may be unlucky dates back to the Hammurabi code, a babylonian code of law, where 13 was skipped. So was 66 through 99, but I suppose that’s too many numbers to be afraid of.
Ok, still, is it lucky or unlucky??
Let’s look at numbers and days.
12 as a number is considered to be “completion” from the 12 months of the year, 12 zodiacs, 12 stations of the sun, and so on. Which makes 13 seem “skewed” to this way of thinking. But in numerology it represents transitions and change, which is reflected in the tarot with the death card, a card of transition and new beginnings.
Fridays themselves are also often considered unlucky in the western world, for like a whole muddled slew of reasons that are also unclear. For Spanish-speaking countries Tuesday the 13th unlucky, in Italy the unlucky day is Friday the 17th. But in witchcraft and paganism, Friday is ruled by Venus, a planet of love, money and happiness, which also aligns with the Greek goddess Aphrodite, of love, beauty, fertility and happiness, and is named after Freyja, the Norse goddess of love, beauty, fertility and battle.
So, Friday the 13th is an ideal day for workings related to changing, transforming or starting a new beginning in love, money, beauty and happiness.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/number-symbolism/7
https://www.norwegianamerican.com/blame-loki-for-your-bad-luck/
https://crucifixvi.medium.com/witches-friday-the-13th-c739f1b626f3