Stuff You Should Know - How Friday the 13th Works

Episode Date: February 12, 2009

What is it about Friday the 13th that gives us the collective willies? Discover the surprising roots of this common superstition -- and what paraskevidekatriaphobia means -- in this HowStuffWorks podcast. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the internet's leading provider of spoken word entertainment. Get a free audio book download of your choice when you sign up today. Log on to AudiblePodcast.com slash Stuff today for details. Hey there, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. Chuck is with me as always. Prison? Couldn't live without

him. You put the two of us together. You get a lumpy little podcast called Stuff You Should Know, right Chuck? Yeah. And that's what you guys are listening to now. And if you are listening to this on its original publishing date, you should be nervous because that means that tomorrow is Friday the 13th. Indeed. And before we really get started, Chuck, I think we should give a proper shout out to two of our listeners, Cameron Clark and Parry Gabriel. Right, this is actually a listener's suggestion. Yes, this is our second one. The first one is body armor. Yes. Yeah. And both Cameron and Parry independently suggested that we do a podcast on Friday the 13th. Right. And we haven't gotten to the bottom of whether or not they're separated at birth or anything like that. But it's a swell

idea. It is. It is. So here we are, right? The day before. So Chuck, I'm, well, actually I'm a terribly superstitious person. I can't really say that I'm not. But I know people who aren't that still kind of take a little extra measure of caution when Friday the 13th rolls around. Right. Are you like that? No, I'm not really that superstitious. And I don't really think about Friday the 13th. It's not even on your mind. No, I mean, I realize it if I look at the calendar, but I don't think two things about it. Gotcha. Okay. Not one thing. I am of less intellect than you. No, you're just more superstitious. That's the same thing. So Chuck, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's actually a phobia. There's a genuine phobia. I don't consider myself having

a phobia, but there is a phobia on the books. And this is all you, buddy. It is all me. And that word, that phobia is pereskevedecotriaphobia. That is awesome. Thank you. Very hard. It looks like the alphabet when I look at the word. It is. It looks like the Cyrillic alphabet almost, right? It's like all consonants. But that is the actual fear of Friday the 13th. And people actually do suffer from this phobia. True. One of the weird things about it is it is this particular phobia, pereskevedecotriaphobia is a cultural, completely cultural construct. It's western. Very much so. Yes. Yeah. So let's, let's get into this. Why do people hate 13? First of all, have you noticed in our building, there's no 13th floor marked on the elevator?

Right. Even though there is a 13th floor, it is marked 14. Right. Okay. But yes, it's still a 13th floor. You can call it whatever you want. True. I call it 13. Yeah. You can put lipstick on a hockey mom and, you know, still a pit bull. Right. So, and it's not just floors and buildings. Hotels often don't have a room 13. Right. Plains don't have the 13th row. It's, that's just weird. Right. It's weird. It's unusual to me that it's placed such a role in our culture that they actually go out of their way to do this. Yeah. And let me give you one more. Okay. Little League Baseball. Yeah. When I wore the number 13, 0.00 batting average for the season hitting the head twice. So it's entirely possible that

13 isn't a very good number. Right. Possibly an untoward number. Right. It's possible that you stink at baseball too. That's actually much more likely. But okay. So anyway, this is old. And like you said, it's rooted in western culture. And actually the fear of Friday the 13th is the convergence actually of two superstitions. Yeah. 13 and Friday. Yeah. We haven't liked either of those things for a while. And it's not just it's this western conception of Friday the 13th being a nervous, a nervous date is actually rooted in Norse mythology. Right. And Christianity. And they seem very separate, but they actually came together and one played off of the other to develop this current fear we have. So you want it, you want to take it? Well, I can tell you a

little bit about the Norse aspect of it. In Norse mythology, there was a hero called Balder. And Balder was killed at a banquet by another god, Loki, a Loki. Did you ever read Marvel's Thor comics? Oh, yeah. Loki was always the bad guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so Balder was killed by Loki, who basically crashed Balder's party. It was a dinner party of 12. And he was the 13th guest. So that story, when you tie into Christianity, the last supper, Judas, who betrayed Christ, was the 13th guest. Yeah. So one of the common fears is or common things is never go to a dinner party of 13. Yeah. That just seems like a good rule of thumb after, you know, those two very monumental experiences in history, right under the circumstances. Okay. So you said that that

kind of ties in this last supper and then this banquet in Christian, in the Christian religion in Norse mythology, right? Yes. There's actually kind of a school of thought out there. And it basically says that Judaism, Christianity, and pretty much everything that came after that is rooted in ancient Egyptian religion. Okay. Did you know this? I did not. You're schooling me. Okay. You ready? Yeah. So there's this guy named Tom Harper. He's an historian, and he compiled a book in 2004 called Pagan Christ. And you can make an argument that it gets a little too granular. Like he's proved his point too much. And perhaps he's being led to see what he wants to see. Right. But basically, what he's he are, he argues is that Christianity

and Judaism just basically took popular beliefs that have been around for centuries, thanks to the Chemites, the ancient Egyptians, specifically between Christianity and the ancient Egyptian mythology. Horus, who's like the main guy, right? Which we'll get to later. Yeah. And listen to our mail. Horus and Jesus Christ bear a very striking resemblance. Just some of the details. First of all, their embodiment, they're like the savior of mankind, right under each religion. But then there's details, too. Like both were born in stables. Both births were heralded by stars. Both had the ability to raise the dead. Right. And the births of both of them were witnessed by shepherds. It just kind of goes on and on. He finds a couple hundred comparisons. Really.

As you look at it, some you're like, yeah, you know, that's kind of a stretch. But some you're like, these are really close, right? And it's not like the ancient Egyptians were without contact with anybody. Right. The Greeks learned most of what they knew about mathematics and astronomy and all that from the Egyptians. Sure. So all these people were interacting. It's entirely possible. The thing is, Harper doesn't necessarily manage to prove anything. He illuminates a bunch of stuff, which I think was his intention. But it does underlie or undermine this competition that it seems like the early Christian church had with everybody else. Right. Right. If you look at one of the parallels between horse and Christ, their births were celebrated around the

same time. Right. And people point out that things like the choice of when Christmas lies on or when Easter lies on, these were kind of placed around the time of pagan holidays to compete with them. Interesting. So people wouldn't would have to choose. They couldn't go, well, I'm going to be pagan on this date. And then, you know, a month down the road, I get to have Christmas too. Right. That's not good, right? If you're going to try to get everybody to your flock. And one of the one of the pagan groups that were heavily targeted by the early church were the Norse. Right. And there's an idea that 13, they already didn't like 13. Sure. But the Norse were also very, they venerated women. And the early church was not big into women having

power of any kind. Yeah, that's true. So Frigga, who was actually Balder, the hero Balder's mother, she used to show up at witch covens. So there'd be 12 witches and she'd be the 13th. Right. Under Christian cosmology, anytime you've got 12 witches, the 13th one's going to be the devil. Exactly. All these, this competition created all of this accepted ideas in one culture were, you know, horrible and bad and under Christianity. It was competition. Right. That's good stuff. Thanks a lot. I'm impressed. Okay. So Friday, the day Friday actually in Christianity is also unlucky, considered to be unlucky. Yes, you want to take that? Sure. Supposedly Christ was crucified on a Friday. Not say supposedly, that's what they say. Right. And some theologians, theologians,

excuse me, say that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit on a Friday. So that's another bad mark against it. Really? The great flood began on a Friday when Noah built the ark and flooded the earth. Noah didn't flood the earth. He built the ark. And a lot of Christians in the past would not begin any new project or trip on a Friday because they thought it would be doomed. Yeah. So you take that Friday and you take the 13 and you marry them. And a lot of people think that that's why Friday the 13th came about as badness. Yeah. So is that the case? I mean, is that is that true? Is there badness to it? Well, it depends on who you ask. There have been studies here and there. There was one in 1993, the British Medical Journal published one. I love this title. Is

Friday the 13th bad for your health? Yeah. And they compared a ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th over a period of several years. And what they found out was consistently fewer people chose to drive on Friday the 13th. But the number of hospital admissions due to car accidents went up compared to a normal Friday. Did they conclude that it was possibly because people were a little more on edge on Friday the 13th or what? I think that was one of the conclusions. Yeah. Yeah. Which sort of makes sense. But that is strange that there is an increase on Friday the 13th. Right. Which goes back to the thing that you were talking about with Harper. Perhaps you're looking when

you're looking for something, you're bound to find it. I remember, did you see the movie Pie? Yes. Darren Aronofsky's first film? Drill to the head. Yeah. That was tough. They raised a similar thing when the old guy kind of assaulted the dude and said, if you look for any number, you're going to find it. If the number in your head is 24, you're going to find 24 steps to your apartment, 24 times that you used a whisk to beat the eggs, that kind of thing. Right. So perhaps that plays a part as well. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God. Talk about

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All that on unreformed. Listen to unreformed on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, there's a psychological bias, I guess. You're preparing yourself, you're looking harder than usual, right? That makes sense. Well, if you went to Italy on Friday the 13th, you would probably find very few people who were particularly moved by it. True. True. In Italy, actually, the unlucky number is 17, because under Roman numerals, it would be what? XVII. And if you rearrange them to VIXI, that is, he lived, and it's past tense, and you often find that on gravestones. 17 is an unlucky number. Try scaring somebody around here with 17. It's not going to happen. They'll just blink at you a little bit and walk away. I've got another

couple of examples of XIII being a good thing. In Judaism, XIII is the age at which a boy matures into a man, and you have your bar mitzvah, so that's good. Colgate University, did you know this one? No, I didn't share this one with you. They are a liberal arts college in New York state, and they love the number XIII. The tradition there, they said Colgate was founded by 13 men with $13.00 and 13 prayers and 13 articles, and the university is actually at 13 Oak Drive, so every Friday the 13th, they throw a big party, basically, and really embrace it and wear the school colors and that kind of thing. That's pretty cool. So they're going to have one tomorrow, then? Yeah. You know, go with Colgate. Yeah, excuse me, someone's at Colgate University right

now listening to this, and they're swelling some keg beer to Friday the 13th. I think that'd be pretty cool. I think so too. So you know, in Japan and China, what the unlucky number is? Isn't it four? It is four. I knew that. Because apparently in both languages, and I'm surprised to hear this, in both languages, the pronunciation of the number four is very, very much similar to the pronunciation for the word death, so you may not find a four on a menu in a Chinese restaurant or something like that. Right? I'm going to keep an eye out, actually, in the future, see if there's a four. That's good. Like the number four meal on a Chinese menu. Yeah. Maybe it's happy family. Maybe so. I got a few more 13s for you if you're patient. I am. In the world of sports, there

have been some very famous awesome athletes that wore the number 13. So you would think it would not be unlucky. Dan Marino, one of the best quarterbacks to ever play. Yeah. But one of the best quarterbacks to ever play and not win a Super Bowl. Yeah, it makes you wonder how much better he would have been had he not worn 13. Right. And that's the first thing that comes to my mind. Sure. Alex Rodriguez, a famous baseball player right now for the New York Yankees. He could be a superstar. He is a superstar, and he wears the number 13, but the Yankees have not been to a World Series since he joined their roster. That is interesting. In 2004, even though they have the powerhouse all-star lineup, so maybe that's unlucky. And Will Chamberlain is 13,

but he won all kinds of things. Yeah. I'd say that is lucky in that case. Yeah. I've heard people say the number 13 is a lucky number, but that's not my experience. I'm among A-Rod and Dan Marino as just a failed sports figure for the number 13. Well, I don't know if I could call them failed sports figures. He has a batting average very much higher than 0.0. Agreed. Friday 13th films. Are you sure you've seen some of these? Sure. There have been 12, including the ones. No, there haven't. Yes. They've made 12 of those? Well, there were 11 original films, including the Freddie versus Jason thing. Yeah. That was pretty much terrible. Yeah. But tomorrow actually is the release of the remake of the original. Yes. And that makes the fourth one in the series to be

released on Friday the 13th. Wow. So it's good marketing. So this is 12. This is the number, the 12th one. Surely they're going to make it to 13, right? Well, they're probably going to start remaking them all. I would say if this is successful. Okay. And this year there are three Friday the 13th actually, which is kind of unusual. And two months in a row, February and March, which is very unusual. Yeah. So that's good stuff. I agree. And I got one more for you. Okay. The band Black Sabbath. I love Sabbath. Yeah, we both do. They released their debut album on February 13th, Friday, February 13th, 1970. That seems like something they would do. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? They've been around since 70. Yeah. Isn't it crazy that Ozzie can still walk?

Barely. Yeah. Well, that's funny that you bring up the calendar, Chuck, because I've got one last little snippet. Okay. One of the reasons why Friday the 13th is a problem is because we moved to a solar calendar under Pope Gregory, the fifth, I think. Yeah, Greg. Okay. So he commanded that we moved to a solar calendar from a lunar calendar, again, paganism. Right. And because in the pagan culture, in the pagan calendar, there are actually 13 months based on the lunar cycle, which is connected to the menstrual cycle, which again, got to get away from women. There you have it. I'm not going to go there. So this Friday the 13th and February, Friday the 13th and March, that wouldn't have happened had we stayed with the original pagan lunar calendar.

Interesting. Yes. Well, love you. These are all nice little tidbits. This was full of water cooler type of... That's because there's absolutely nothing to Friday the 13th. Well, that's one of the main points, though, is even though there's all these ancient things that's rooted in, the modern fear of Friday the 13th, evidently, most people don't even know these ancient things. So it's pretty much just one of those things that's been created. Yeah. For our enjoyment. Yep. Nothing to it, folks. Don't worry. Basically, this is one way to make it through the day on a Friday. Absolutely. A little more on guard than ever. So there you go. Well, you guys be safe just in case, just in case this Friday the 13th,

the next Friday the 13th and all Friday the 13th. We want you around to listen to our sweet voices for as long as possible. So don't leave your home. All right. Well, Chuck, do you have any listener mail? I do, but I believe we have in our sponsor needs to chime in first. Oh, yeah. Let's do that. You want it? Yeah. Let's kick it off. Audible.com. Yes. Actually, if everybody goes to audiblepodcast.com slash stuff, they can sign up. They can register and they'll immediately be eligible for one free download, right? Which is a book on tape or everything. Sure. Anything you can conceive of that you could make into audio, they've got it, right? There's like 50,000 titles, lots of titles. And I went online. I was browsing and they have

my favorite detective novel of all time, Dashel Hammett's Maltese Falcon. Oh, really? And they have it in several different forms. They have a dramatized form and a couple of different ones, but they have like the straight, you know, novel read aloud, which I'm actually looking forward to getting. Who reads it, you know? I do. And I don't remember his name, but it's no one I've heard of. Okay. Well, I'm going to recommend and you're going to say you hippy. I'm going to recommend Jack Kerouac's On The Road. You hippy. It's, you know, the classic beat generation novel. And I'm going to recommend it because it's read by David Carradine. Awesome. Kane of Kung Fu himself reads it. And Bill from Kill Bill. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my recommendation. Yeah, you can

find both of those. And like we said, 49,998 more, at least, by going to audiblepodcast.com, backslash stuff, and registering to get your free one. So now is it listener mail time? Now's listener mail time. I think I've been made to wait long enough. Yes. So Chuck, what do you have for us? Josh, I have a listener mail that we're going to call the Horus Firestorm of 09. We got a lot of emails about you messing up the fact that I believe you said. I said Horus was the God. He was the one with the dog's head. Right. I didn't even have the right animal. Ancient Egypt. It turns out what I should have said was Horus has the head of a jackal if we're even going to be in the right ballpark. Right. But that's Anubis. Yes. Anubis,

one of the two, actually has the head of a jackal as the ancient Egyptian God with the head of a jackal. Yes. Horus, and I'm sorry, everybody, it turns out Horus is the one with the head of a cat. So I apologize to everybody who, no, no, no. Horus had the head of a falcon. What? I will not let you mislead listeners anymore. And thank you to all these people who wrote in, including Satyarth Mishra from India, age 13, Jessica Sastra of Jacksonville, Florida, Logan Larson, studying in France, Catherine Lee, Thomas Radke, Chris Albrecht of KUJ Hawks, Eric S of Philadelphia, Jeremy Sheehan, Alex Clifford of Livermore, California, Rick RIC, nothing more. Right. Tommy Schiano of the Mafia, Jason Barnhart, Andrew Smith of Jerusalem, and then my favorite,

Rachel Austin and Boulder sent this correction in the form of a haiku, which we love. It is Anubis Jackal, Horus, Sun, Moon, Eye, Falcon, Egypt, next podcast. So thank you, Rachel, for being so creative with that. Thanks to all of you. Ever since the first email trickled in, I've been wearing my hair shirt. So I think I can take it off now. What do you think, Chuck? You've been punched. It's so itchy. Horus is not a cat. Well, if you want to send us a podcast about ancient Egyptian gods or anything that strikes your fancy, you can send it to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away

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