13 September—On this salubrious Friday the 13^th, consider that it can occur only if the month containing it (assuming seven-day weeks, of course) begins on a Sunday. Work it out. Every year in the Gregorian calendar has at least one Friday the 13^th but never more than three. 2024 gives us two Fridays the 13^th, the second one coming in December. Easy to remember, wait for December.

The unluckiness of the number 13 may go back to the Last Seder, when there likely wasn’t enough matzo or wine for all the 13 celebrants, so the 13^th one—the youngest apostle, Judas—who was supposed to recite the Four Questions, refused to perform. And he neither forgave nor forgot. And of course the rest is in the New Testament.

Or perhaps the curse of the number 13 may go back to Norse myth, wherein the pathologically mischievous god Loki crashed what’s thought to have been an intimate dinner party—but probably not a seder—12 other gods were having in Valhalla and hired the blind marksman Höðr to shoot Baldur with a mistletoe-tipped arrow. Don’t ask why, but the mistletoe-tipped arrow killed Baldur. (So think twice at Christmas.) In all events, the whole Earth mourned Baldur and 13 became an unlucky number.

Not that it matters, but the vindictive Höðr and late Baldur were in fact brothers, sons of the god Odin and the goddess Frigg. And—no surprise—the dinner party had been thrown by Odin, who was probably in his cups when his son was offed by his other son. Would you have invited your kids?

So much for the unlucky number 13. Friday the 13^th is a different story. Contrary to what you may have been taught, heard, or seen on television, that superstition probably has nothing to do with the arrest of the Knights Templar (the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Jerusalem, as they styled themselves, perhaps the original fraudulent 501[c][3]) on Friday 13 October 1307 by agents of King Philip IV of France, whose forensic auditors evidently had pierced the Templars’ corporate veil. So maybe it does.

We know for certain that the dramaturgic curse of Friday the 13^th dates from a French stage play in 1834 in which a character laments (in French, of course), “I was born on a Friday, December 13^th, 1813, from which come all of my misfortunes.” Mon Dieu!

Then there’s the literary curse in Thomas Lawson’s 1907 American novel aptly titled “Friday the Thirteenth,” in which an unscrupulous stock broker takes advantage of the superstition to create a panic on Wall Street. You don’t need superstition for that. Lawson did very well for himself manipulating the market, by the way. But if Lawson didn’t make up the superstition for his novel, where did he get it from? In all events, there have been no market cataclysms on Friday the 13^th.

And then there’s the Friday the 13^th movie franchise. But not for here . . .