Something you definitely shouldn’t do is look in the tags of that very fake “the Catholic Church ruined Friday the 13th” post because it’s full of this:
The Runner Up:
The Grand Prize Winner:
You can’t talk about a post and then not have a screencap or something of it. I’d like to see what the post was, OP. :>
I am happy to oblige!
The rebuttal, for those interested, is this:
“Unfortunately for theories such as these, there appears to be no evidence that Friday the 13th (as a particular combination of day of the week and date of the month) was believed to be unlucky before the end of the 19th century. As late as the 1898 edition of E Cobham Brewer’s immense Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, there are separate entries for Friday as unlucky and thirteen as unlucky, but nothing about the combination of the two.
“Recent research by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer has shown that while the separate superstitions were strong in the 19th century, the combination of the two only really began to affect public consciousness from 1907 onwards. In that year, the Boston financier Thomas W Lawson published his novel Friday, the Thirteenth, a mixture of romantic love-story and polemic against the stock market, which cemented the connection between day and date by using the title phrase as both the opening and closing words of the story. Thanks to Lawson’s massive self-promotion, the book sold 60,000 copies in its first month and was even filmed in 1916 as a feature-length silent movie. The novel is almost entirely forgotten today, while the film no longer exists, but it appears that Lawson’s book is the primary origin of the modern fear of the date…By the 1930s, Friday the 13th had become the USA’s most popular superstition, and has remained strongly associated with the stock market, a notion that would undoubtedly have delighted Lawson. Share-trading tends to drop on Friday the 13th, and if the date occurs in October, the markets can become particularly nervous. The day is also bad for business generally: the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, estimates that in the USA between 800 and 900 million dollars’ worth of business are lost on Friday the 13th because people refuse to travel or go to work.” [emphasis added]
– Steve Moore, “Friday the 13th.” In Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, edited by Una McGovern. Chambers Harrap, 2007.
Thanks for adding the rebuttal as well as the original post! This is really interesting. :>
I believe even superstitions about 13 are comparatively recent, and for a long time consisted solely of the belief that if thirteen people sat down to dinner, one of them would die within the year*, with the number not being considered particularly unlucky in any other context.
*I kind of wonder if this got started early in the history of mortality statistics, with someone mistaking correlation for cause.
Mooncustafer 