Friday the 13th and the Templars

[Baker, John]

        Mark, are you saying that you yourself remember that in the
1950s it was already claimed that Friday the 13th was supposed to be
unlucky because of the Knights Templar incident?  That's much earlier
than I would have guessed.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Mark Mandel
Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2008 5:05 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Friday the 13th and the Templars

Oh, hell, without even looking in Wikipedia I'll attest to it from the
fifties... and I'd bet it goes back a number of centuries earlier at the
very least.

...

Okay, I'd lose that bet. WP
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th) says in part

>>>>>

Despite the reputation of the two separated elements, there is no
evidence for a "Friday the 13th" superstition before the 19th century,
and folklore historians state that Friday the 13th was a convergence of
the superstitions about "Friday" and "13".[3][4][5] The earliest known
reference in English occurs in an 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.[7]

The superstition is rarely found before the 20th century, when it became
extremely common. One author, noting that references are all but
nonexistent before 1907 but frequently seen thereafter, has argued that
its popularity derives from the publication that year of Thomas W.
Lawson's popular novel Friday, the Thirteenth,[8] in which an
unscrupulous broker takes advantage of the superstition to create a Wall
Street panic on a Friday the 13th.[3]

Though the superstition developed relatively recently, much older
origins are often claimed for it, most notably in the 2003 novel The Da
Vinci Code, which declares that the superstition began with the arrest
of the Knights Templar on Friday 13 October 1307.[9] The association
with the Templars predates The Da Vinci Code[10] but is relatively
recent and is a modern-day invention.[6][2][9]

<<<<<

WP's reference #6 is Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/luck/friday13.asp),
which asserts that the Templar connection is modern but cites no
specific source:

>>>>>

The belief in Friday the 13th as a day on which Murphy's Law reigns
supreme and anything that can go wrong will go wrong appears to be
largely a 20th century phenomenon. (The claim that the Friday the 13th
superstition began with the arrest of the final Grand Master of the
Knights Templar, Jacques Demolay, on Friday, October 13, 1307, is a
modern-day invention.)

    ...

Books of English folklore generally cite a 1913 Notes & Queries
reference as the earliest known expression of Friday the 13th as a day
of evil luck, and this corresponds to what we found when we searched The
New York Times and the Los Angeles Times for similar references.
In both newspapers the first mentions of the ill-fated date occured in
1908, as in this short piece about a U.S. senator from Oklahoma who
dared to tempt fate by introducing 13 bills on Friday the 13th:

...

(It's interesting to note that this very early reference to Friday the
13th already describes it as being an "ancient superstition.")

<<<<<

One of Snopes's references, Opie & Tatem,  A Dictionary of Superstitions
(Oxford Reference Online) has its earliest cite from
1913:

>>>>>

1913 N & Q 11th ser. VIII 434. I have met a 'coach' of fine mental
capacities ... who dreaded the evil luck of Friday the 13th.

<<<<<

"FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH"  A Dictionary of Superstitions. Ed. Iona Opie
and Moira Tatem. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online.
Oxford University Press.  University of Pennsylvania.  29 November 2008
<http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t72.
e639>

Mark Mandel


On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Baker, John <JMB at stradley.com> wrote:
>
>        How old is the bogus theory that Friday the thirteenth is
> supposed to be unlucky because of the persecution of the Knights
> Templar on that day?  It predates its major vector, The Da Vinci Code,

> but surely it isn't terribly old.  The earliest I see on Westlaw is
> from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 9/20/1991:  "Friday the
> 13th:  Bill Anderson of Atlanta called to tell us that Friday the 13th

> became part of Masonic lore as an unlucky day because, on that day in
> 1307, King Philip IV of France had all the members of the Knights
> Templar arrested."
>
>
> John Baker

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