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Saturday, May 17, 2008

The Superstitious, Friday the 13th...


Friday the 13th is considered a day of bad luck in English-, French- and Portuguese-speaking countries around the world, as well as in Germany, Estonia,The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and even the Philippines .

Similar superstitions exist in some other traditions. In Greece, Romania and Spanish-speaking countries, for example, it is Tuesday the 13th that is considered unlucky. In Italy it is Friday the 17th.

The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia, a word derived from the concatenation of the Greek words Paraskeví (meaning Friday), and dekatreís (meaning thirteen), attached to phobía (meaning fear). The term is a specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, a simple phobia (fear) of the number thirteen appearing in any case


What is this Friday 13th?

Both the number thirteen and Friday have been considered unlucky:

In numerology, the number twelve is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in the twelve months of the year, twelve recognized signs of the zodiac, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve Apostles of Jesus, etc., whereas the number thirteen was considered irregular, transgressing this completeness.There is also a superstition, thought by some to derive from the Last Supper, that having thirteen people seated at a table will result in the death of one of the diners.

Friday, as the day on which Jesus Christ was crucified, has been viewed both positively and negatively among Christians. The actual day of Crucifixion was the 14th day of Nissan in the Hebrew Lunar calendar which does not correspond to "Friday" in the solar calendar of Rome. The 15th day of Nissan (beginning at Sundown) is celebration of Passover.

Despite the onus on the two separated elements, there is no evidence for a link between the two before the 19th century. The earliest known reference in English occurs in a 1869 biography of Gioachino Rossini:

[Rossini] was surrounded to the last by admiring and affectionate friends; and if it be true that, like so many other Italians, he regarded Friday as an unlucky day, and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that on Friday, the 13th of November, he died.

However, only in the 20th century did the superstition receive greater audience, as

Friday the 13th doesn't even merit a mention in E. Cobham Brewer's voluminous 1898 edition of the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, though one does find entries for "Friday, an Unlucky Day" and "Thirteen Unlucky." When the date of ill fate finally does make an appearance in later editions of the text, it is without extravagant claims as to the superstition's historicity or longevity.

Though the superstition developed relatively recently, much older origins are often claimed for it, most notably in the novel The Da Vinci Code (and later the film), which traced the belief to the arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday October 13, 1307

Occurances:

The following months have a Friday the 13th:

















The following years have Fridays the 13th in these months:



























This sequence, here given for 2001–2028, repeats every 28 years from 1901 to 2099. The months with a Friday the 13th are determined by the Dominical letter (G, F, GF, etc.) of the year. Any month that begins on a Sunday will contain a Friday the 13th.

Every year has at least one and at most three Fridays the 13th, with 688 occurrences during each 400-year Gregorian cycle (146,097 days).
The longest period that can occur without a Friday the 13th is fourteen months, either from July to September the following year (e.g. in 2001/2002 and 2012/13), or from August to October in a leap year (e.g. in 2027/28).

Patterns for non leap-years:











Patterns for leap years:











Each Gregorian 400-year cycle contains 146,097 days

(365 * 400 = 146,000 normal days plus 97 leap days),
146,097 / 7 = 20,871 weeks, and 400 * 12 = 4,800 months.

Thus, each cycle contains the same pattern of days of the week (and thus the same pattern of Fridays the 13th), but no day of the month up to the 28th can occur the same number of times on each day of the week (because 4,800 is not divisible by 7).

The 13th day of the month is slightly more likely to be a Friday than any other day of the week. On average, there is a Friday the 13th once every 212.35 (212 and 241/688) days.

The distribution of the 13th day over the 4,800 months is as follows:











There were some movies about Friday the 13th....

Friday the 13th at Allmovie
Friday the 13th at the Internet Movie Database

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