Triskaidekaphobia (from
GreekGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
tris meaning "3,"
kai meaning "and," and
deka meaning "10") is
fearA phobia , is an irrational, intense, persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, or people. The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive, unreasonable desire to avoid the feared subject...
of the number
1313 is the natural number after 12 and before 14. It is the smallest integer with eight letters in its spelled out name in English. It is also the age at which children officially become teenagers....
; it is a
superstitionSuperstition is a credulous belief or notion, not based on reason, knowledge, or experience. The word is often used pejoratively to refer to folk beliefs deemed irrational. This leads to some superstitions being called "old wives' tales"...
and related to a specific fear of
Friday the 13thFriday the 13th occurs when the thirteenth day of a month falls on Friday, which superstition holds to be a day of good or bad luck. In the Gregorian calendar, this day occurs at least once, but at most three times a year.-Phobia:...
, called
paraskevidekatriaphobia or
friggatriskaidekaphobia.
Origins
There is a common myth that the earliest reference to thirteen being unlucky or evil is from the Babylonian
Code of HammurabiThe Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved ancient law code, created ca. 1790 BC in ancient Babylon. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi...
(circa 1780 B.C.E.), where the thirteenth law is omitted. In fact, the original Code of Hammurabi has no numeration. The translation by L.W. King (1910)
edited by Richard Hooker has omitted one article:
If the seller have gone to (his) fate (i. e., have died), the purchaser shall recover damages in said case fivefold from the estate of the seller.
Other translations of the Code of Hammurabi, i.e. the translation by Robert Francis Harper, contain the 13th article.
Some Christian traditions have it that at the
Last SupperIn the Christian Gospels, the Last Supper was the last meal Jesus shared with his Twelve Apostles and disciples before his death...
,
JudasJudas Iscariot, "Yehuda" ' was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve original Apostles of Jesus. Among the twelve, he was apparently designated to keep account of the "money bag" Judas Iscariot, "Yehuda" ' was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve original Apostles of...
, the disciple who betrayed
JesusJesus of Nazareth —also known as Jesus Christ or occasionally Jesus the Christ—is the central figure of Christianity. Within most Christian denominations...
, was the 13th to sit at the table. However, the number 13 is not uniformly bad in the
Judeo-ChristianJudeo–Christian is a term used in the United States, broadly to describe a body of concepts and values thought to be held in common by Judaism and Christianity...
tradition. For example, the 13 attributes of God (also called the thirteen attributes of mercy) are enumerated in the Torah (Exodus 34: 6-7). Some modern Christian churches also use 13 attributes of God in sermons.
Triskaidekaphobia may have also affected the Vikings—it is believed that
LokiIn Norse mythology, Loki is a god or jötunn . Loki's relation with the gods varies by source. Loki assists the gods, and sometimes causes problems for them. Loki is a shape shifter and in separate incidents he appears in the form of a salmon and a mare. Loki's positive relations with the gods ends...
in the Norse pantheon was the 13th god. More specifically, Loki was believed to have engineered the murder of Baldr, and was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. This is perhaps related to the superstition that if thirteen people gather, one of them will die in the following year. Another Norse tradition involves the myth of
Norna-GestNorna-Gests þáttr or the Story of Norna-Gest is a legendary saga about the Norse hero Norna-Gest. The story is inserted into the Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason in the Flatey Book and contains several poems from the Poetic Edda...
: when the uninvited
nornsThe Norns are a kind of dísir, numerous female beings who rule the fates of the various races of Norse mythology....
showed up at his birthday celebration—thus increasing the number of guests from ten to thirteen— the norns cursed the infant by magically binding his lifespan to that of a mystic candle they presented to him.
Ancient Persians believed the twelve constellations in the Zodiac controlled the months of the year, and each ruled the earth for a thousand years at the end of which the sky and earth collapsed in chaos. Therefore, the thirteenth is identified with chaos and the reason Persians leave their houses to avoid bad luck on the thirteenth day of the Persian Calendar, a tradition called Sizdah Bedar.
In 1881, an influential group of New Yorkers led by U.S. Civil War veteran Captain
William FowlerWilliam Fowler was a Scottish poet, writer, courtier, and translator, active from 1581 to 1612.He was the son of Janet Fockhart and William Fowler, a well connected Edinburgh burgess. He graduated from St Leonard's College, St Andrews in 1578. By 1581 he was in Paris studying civil law...
came together to put an end to this and other superstitions. They formed a dinner cabaret club, which they called the Thirteen Club. At the first meeting, on Friday 13 January 1881 at 8:13 p.m., 13 people sat down to dine in room 13 of the venue. The guests walked under a ladder to enter the room and were seated among piles of spilled salt. All of the guests survived. Thirteen Clubs sprang up all over North America for the next 40 years. Their activities were regularly reported in leading newspapers, and their numbers included five future U.S. presidents, from
Chester A. ArthurChester Alan Arthur was an American politician who served as the 21st President of the United States. Arthur was a member of the Republican Party and worked as a lawyer before becoming the 20th Vice President under James Garfield. While Garfield was mortally wounded by Charles J...
to
Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States. He is well remembered for his energetic persona, his range of interests and achievements, his model of masculinity, and his "cowboy" image. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the short-lived Bull Moose Party...
. Thirteen Clubs had various imitators, but they all gradually faded from interest as people became less superstitious.
On Friday, 13 October 1307, the
Knights TemplarThe Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon , commonly known as the Knights Templar or the Order of the Temple , were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders...
were ordered arrested by
Philip IV of FrancePhilip IV , called the Fair , son and successor of Philip III, reigned as King of France from 1285 until his death. He was the husband of Joan I of Navarre, by virtue of which he was King of Navarre and Count of Champagne from 1284 to 1305...
. The theory has been suggested, in the book Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry by
John J. RobinsonJohn J. Robinson was an American author and historian, best known as the author of Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, which was originally intended as a book about the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, but instead traced the fall of the Knights Templar, which he connected to the rise of...
, that the Templars went underground among masons in England and later developed into Freemasons. Because most of the founding fathers of the United States of America were Freemasons, it is possible the memory of the terror of that day is preserved in the
Friday the 13thFriday the 13th occurs when the thirteenth day of a month falls on Friday, which superstition holds to be a day of good or bad luck. In the Gregorian calendar, this day occurs at least once, but at most three times a year.-Phobia:...
.
Similar phobias
- Tetraphobia
Tetraphobia is an aversion to or fear of the number 4. It is a superstition most common in East Asian regions such as China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan....
, fear of the number 4 — (phonetically similar to 'death') in KoreaKorea is a civilization and formerly unified nation currently divided into two states. Located on the Korean Peninsula, it borders China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait....
, ChinaChina is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
, and Japanis an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, as well as in many East-Asian and some Southeast-Asian countries, it's not uncommon for buildings (including offices, apartments, hotels) to lack floors with the number 4, and Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia's 1xxx-9xxx series of mobile phones does not include any model numbers beginning with a 4. In Taiwan, tetraphobia is so common that there are no 4's or x4's for hospitals.
- 17 is Italy's unlucky number, because in Roman digits 17 is written XVII, that could be rearranged to "VIXI," which in Latin means literally "I have lived" but can be a euphemism
A euphemism is a substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the listener, or in the case of Doublespeak, to make it less troublesome for the speaker...
for "I am dead." Cesana PariolCesana Pariol was the venue for bobsled, luge and skeleton during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. The track, built for the games, is located in Cesana...
, the bobsleighBobsleigh, bobsled or bobsledge is a winter sport invented by Englishmen in the late 1860s in which teams make timed runs down narrow, twisting, banked, iced tracks in a gravity-powered sled...
, lugeA luge is a small one- or two-person sled on which one sleds supine and feet-first. Steering is done by flexing the sled's runners with the calf of each leg or exerting opposite shoulder pressure to the seat. Luge is also the name of the sport which involves racing with such sleds...
, and skeletonSkeleton originated as a spin-off from the popular British sport of Cresta Sledding in St. Moritz, Switzerland. While Skeleton "sliders" use similar equipment to Cresta "riders", the two sports are different and should not be confused .-History:...
track used for the 2006 Winter OlympicsThe 2006 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XX Olympic Winter Games, were a winter multi-sport event which was celebrated in Turin, Italy from February 10, 2006, through February 26, 2006. This marked the second time Italy hosted the Olympic Winter Games, the first being the VII Olympic...
, had turn 17 originally named "Senza Nome" ("without name" in ), but the turn was renamed in 2007 in honor of lugeA luge is a small one- or two-person sled on which one sleds supine and feet-first. Steering is done by flexing the sled's runners with the calf of each leg or exerting opposite shoulder pressure to the seat. Luge is also the name of the sport which involves racing with such sleds...
r Paul HildgartnerPaul Hildgartner was an Italian luger who competed from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. Competing in five Winter Olympics, he earned two gold medals and one silver medal for his efforts...
.
- Paraskavedekatriaphobia
Friday the 13th occurs when the thirteenth day of a month falls on Friday, which superstition holds to be a day of good or bad luck. In the Gregorian calendar, this day occurs at least once, but at most three times a year.-Phobia:...
is the fear of Friday the 13th, which is considered to be a day of bad luck in a number of western cultureWestern culture refers to cultures of European origin.The term "Western culture" is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies...
s. In RomaniaRomania is a country located in Southeastern and Central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Almost all of the Danube Delta is located within its territory...
n, GreekGreece , officially the Hellenic Republic , is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula....
and HispanicSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.
[The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though España , Estado español and Nación española are used interchangeably...]
cultures, Tuesday the 13th is considered unlucky.
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