13: The Story of the World's Most Popular Superstition

One must die

To our prehistoric forebears, Charles Platt solemnly assured his readers in 1925, the number twelve marked an arithmetical limit. Endowed by nature with ten fingers and two feet (but not, it seems, with the mental flexibility to think of moving on to his toes), the Stone Age mathematician found in thirteen a harrowing glimpse into the unknown. Such is the scholarly company a historian of superstition has to keep, the meta-muddle surrounding what were soft-headed fears from the start. Add the impossibility of ever really establishing how widespread superstitions are, or how deep they run, and you get some sense of the challenges facing Nathaniel Lachenmeyer in Thirteen: The world's most popular superstition.

To begin with, just how serious should his study be? The word triskaidekaphobia, he points out, has become talismanic in its own right, beloved of trivia buffs and selected in surveys of "favourite words". How far the word even represents a thing these days is difficult to say; the idea that it might may be something of a superstition in itself. Lachenmeyer's awareness of this irony, his sense of the space between belief and social acknowledgement, are essential to the appeal and interest of his book. At the same time, though, they can make for frustrating reading as we try to catch hold of a subject in apparently infinite regression.

Take the situation today. Everyone knows that thirteen is "unlucky for some", but few will admit to harbouring such fears. That the superstition is out there appears to be confirmed by all those buildings without thirteenth floors and planes without row thirteens, but it's a belief much more deferred to than avowedly held. Hotel and airline managements don't, they invariably insist, have thirteen-related anxieties themselves, but why risk alienating potential customers who just might? As for the "Friday the 13th" article in the press, with the possible exception of the "Modish New Inclusion in Major Reference Work", this must be the feature writer's most reliable standby. Such pieces walk a tonal tightrope, studiously lighthearted and yet just serious enough to allow the reader the enjoyable feeling that modern life has room for the eccentric, the alien, the mystic, the plain perverse. But any difficulty in finding the right note is more than offset by ease of "research": the same canards come up time after time. The idea of unlucky thirteen is an ancient one; it is found in the Norse legend of Loki's arrival -- the thirteenth guest -- at the feast in Valhalla at which Baldur was subsequently killed. In the Christian tradition, the taboo has its origin in the Last Supper, at which Jesus and his disciples made a fateful thirteen. Was the Norse tradition really pre-Christian? It was not written down until much later. What of all those occasions on which Christ and the disciples came together more auspiciously? What are we to make of abundant evidence that, precisely because it was the number of Jesus and his closest companions, Christians for centuries held thirteen in high regard? Lachenmeyer, it must be said, is a fount of good sense on such matters.

Even so, his book leaves the reader feeling giddy. Partly that is because this is an area in which good sense doesn't necessarily seem to count for much; partly it is because the gap between awareness of the superstition and actual belief was always there. But there is also the question of how far we should let the superstition worry us, even if it exists and is deeply held: how important is it to ecraser so absurd an infame? Some believe the indulgence of such ideas risks reinforcing our credulity towards everything, from high-protein diets to Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Such readers face the challenge of deciding where "mere" superstition takes up and respectable religious belief leaves off: is Cherie Blair's Catholicism to be distinguished from her crystals?) Others will follow Oscar Wilde who, as Lachenmeyer explains, saw superstitions as "the colour element of thought and imagination" (or said he did). Lachenmeyer's own open mindedness on this issue may be judicious, but it doesn't necessarily make life any easier for his reader, who would have been helped too had his book been clearer in its aims. A taste for lists and excursions into what seems like merely ornamental information prompt a suspicion that Thirteen may have started life as one of those archly serendipitous "loo books".

Lachenmeyer makes it clear fairly quickly that he has bigger intellectual fish to fry, but his historical investigation initially takes us through a bewildering sequence of blind alleys. Only after chasing down a series of spurious origins does he begin to anchor us in a clear chronology for unlucky thirteen -- and a more modern one than might have been expected. He dates the first occurrences to the late seventeenth century, a timetable which, as he himself observes, sees it starting in the fearful aftermath of the Great Plague. This would make perfect sense -- for what that's worth: as Lachenmeyer has already shown us, logic is a poor guide in these matters.

It is all terribly elusive: implicit in his account of the superstition's subsequent propagation into the early nineteenth century, though, is its association with the spread of that other pestilence, the mass media. By the Victorian period, the idea of unlucky thirteen was familiar throughout the English-speaking world. (And this despite a determined rearguard action by upholders of lucky thirteen in the USA, where this had been the number of the founding states.) Even then, it was not the thirteen superstition as we know it, since it applied specifically to the number sitting down together for a meal. Where thirteen were seated, it was said, in the most widely known version of the superstition, one of those present would die within the year. The odds on one of any given twelve or fourteen diners dying over that sort of period would have been reasonable too, of course, but that sort of calculation cut no ice with determined believers. Neither did the fact that the superstition was repeatedly defied and disproved -- from the 1880s by a growing number of rationalist "Thirteen Clubs". Beyond a glow of self-satisfaction for the enlightened movers and shakers who participated, these thirteen-at-a-table dinners were entirely unproductive. But if superstition remained obstinately unbanished, it certainly shifted its ground: since the early twentieth century, the emphasis has been on unlucky Friday the 13th. Lachenmeyer sees the massive publicity surrounding a now-forgotten novel as decisive in this development: whatever the immediate cause, few people are now aware it was ever unlucky to sit down thirteen at a table.

Today, those who have feelings about thirteen are far more likely to be -philes than -phobes: Lachenmeyer points to Margaret Murray as the main originator of this tradition. Ironically, her work on witchcraft came about almost by chance, the First World War having prevented her reaching Egypt, where her primary interests lay. This did not stop her establishing the notion that witchcraft was a survival of England's pre-Christian religion, a belief which has resisted repeated debunking by serious scholars. The charge that witches formed thirteen-strong covens was presumably first made by prosecutors to suggest the blasphemous burlesquing of Jesus and his disciples. As reclaimed by twentieth-century neopaganism, though, the number became that of the lunar calendar, its benign and feminine influence ruthlessly suppressed by the forces of Church and State and patriarchal twelve.

In vain may hidebound historians bleat of the Church's early reverence for thirteen. Those determined to hold to a superstition will hardly be swayed from their conviction by anything so insubstantial as the factual record. Yet this is not the main point of a study which is after all at pains to show how shallow the roots of such superstitions often are. Lachenmeyer is less interested in the sheer irrationality of these beliefs than in the abrupt and arbitrary turnabouts by which they often change. In the United States of the late eighteenth century, for example, all seemed set fair for thirteen to maintain its status as a lucky number, but within a few years its fortunes had suffered a complete reversal. A fear that may be felt by few but is accommodated by all: a superstition may be maddeningly difficult to pin down. A novel here, a bit of cod scholarship there: the decisive influences may be as improbable as they are unpredictable. An uneven, often exasperating book, Thirteen does hold this final, fascinating lesson which all of us, perhaps, would do well to heed. "Cultural beliefs do not always evolve slowly, directed by significant historical forces", writes Nathaniel Lachenmeyer; "often, they can and do turn on a dime."

Michael Kerrigan is the author of To Be or Not To Be: Shakespeare's Soliloquies, 2002, and Shakespeare on Love, 2003.

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