It is said: If 13 people sit down to dinner together, all will
die within the year. The Turks so disliked the number 13 that it
was practically expunged from their vocabulary (Brewer, 1894). Many
cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue.
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Many buildings don't have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in
your name, you will have the devil's luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles
Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have
13 letters in their names).
Often enough, theories on the origins of folk beliefs come off
sounding like vaporous flights of fancy themselves.
It has been proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the
number 13 are as old as the act of counting. Primitive man had only
his 10 fingers and two feet to represent units, so he could not
count higher than 12. What lay beyond that "13" was an
impenetrable, frightening mystery, thus a source of
superstition.
Which has a lovely, didactic ring to it, but one is left wondering:
Did primitive man not have toes?
In any case, despite whatever terrors the numerical unknown held
for their primitive forebears, ancient civilizations were not
unanimous in their dread of 13. The Chinese regarded the number as
lucky, historians say, as did the Egyptians in the time of the
pharaohs.
To the ancient Egyptians, life was a quest for spiritual ascension
which unfolded in stages 12 in this life and a thirteenth beyond,
thought to be the eternal afterlife. The number 13 therefore
symbolized death not in terms of dust and decay, but as a
glorious and desirable transformation. Egyptian civilization
perished, this explanation continues, but the symbolism of the
number 13 lived on only to be corrupted by other cultures (the
Romans, for example) and bound to a fear of death instead of a
reverence for the afterlife. (In Tarot decks, the Death card bears
the number 13 but still, as typically interpreted, retains its
original, more positive meaning: transformation.)
Another theory suggests the number 13 was purposely vilified by the
priests of patriarchal religions because it represented femininity.
Thirteen was allegedly revered in prehistoric goddess-worshipping
cultures because it corresponded to the number of lunar (menstrual)
cycles in a year (13 x 28 = 364 days). The "Earth Mother of
Laussel," for example, a 27,000-year-old carving found near the
Lascaux caves in France and often cited as an icon of matriarchal
spirituality, depicts a female figure holding a cresent-shaped horn
bearing 13 notches. According to this explanation, as the solar
calendar triumphed over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated
civilization, so did the number 12 over the number 13, which became
anathema.
One of the more concrete early taboos connected with the number 13
a taboo some still subscribe to today, apparently is said to
have originated with the Hindus, who believed, for reasons I
haven't been able to ascertain, that it is always unlucky for 13
people to gather in one place say, at dinner. Interestingly
enough, exactly the same superstition has been attributed to the
ancient Vikings, though many scholars regard this and the
accompanying mythological explanation as apocryphal. Be that as it
may, the story has been told as follows:
Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the Evil
One, god of mischief, had been excluded from the guest list but
crashed the party anyway, bringing the total number of attendees to
13. True to character, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind
god of winter, to attack Balder the Good, who was a favorite of the
gods.
