The Number Thirteen
Sometimes I have to work in the various towers of midtown, Hudson yards, downtown Brooklyn and so on. More than a few of these towers do not have a thirteenth floor, as made evident by the elevator panel, where the number thirteen is conspicuously absent. I had thought that this superstition belonged to the past, typical of certain eras, like the art deco towers of the 1930’s for instance, but recently I went up in a brand-new residential tower in LIC and found that this new tower also does not have a thirteenth floor. What is the curious omission?
The internet offers scanty and contradictory information as to why the number thirteen is bad, except that it is bad and has been for a while. The death card in Tarot is marked number thirteen. The fear of the number thirteen is known as triskaidekaphobia. The fear of Friday the thirteenth is paraskevidekatriaphobia. Norse mythology attributes Friday the thirteenth to Freya, queen of the witches and goddess of fertility.. In Chinese numerology thirteen is an auspicious number and symbolizes fertility. The Mayan calendar is based on thirteen.
A common—and rather gloomy—urban legend is that if you have thirteen people over for dinner one of them must die. This superstition is derived, of course, from the last supper, where the Christ is unlucky number thirteen, and must be betrayed. Or is it Judas who is unlucky? This reminds me of Borges brilliant story of heresy, Three Versions of Judas, in which Jesus becomes Judas and Judas becomes Jesus. Many claim that the last supper is the origin for the badness of 13; but then isn’t Christ supposed to die? This all tends to ignore the fact that Mary Magdalene, “apostle to the apostles”—and whose name appears in the new testament thirteen times—is often considered the thirteenth apostle; where was she at that unlucky dinner? Of course the next day is good Friday, the day of crucifixion, and that, probably, turns into a bad Friday when combined with the number thirteen.
Some online witches make the argument that the number thirteen is bad, according to patriarchy, because it is the the number of the moon, and menstruation; it is the number of the divine feminine. Thirteen is likewise the ideal number of attendants to have in a coven. The argument is that if the number twelve is a kind of perfectly square “male” number, then thirteen is the return of the feminine.
Twelve shows up regularly in square contexts such as the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve disciples, twelve days of Christmas, twelve months of the year, twelve signs of astrology, and twelve hours on the face of the clock. Twelve is the number of the clockwork heavens, the number of machine time; a number representing Man’s attempt to apply logical sequence to the revolving fall of the solar system as it plunges down the galaxy (a failed attempt, btw, for the calendar must have leap days and leap years in order to stay on time. See Terrence McKenna’s talk on the hubris of the Gregorian Calendar, “A Calendar for the Goddess.”) The number thirteen then becomes the imperfect remainder; whatever eludes clock time. It is the number of moon-time and-tide time and body-time; the time that can’t be measured. Thirteen is precisely what twelve represses. It is the number of the not-all, as Lacan would say. The witch’s argument is that thirteen remains unlucky in the same way that a black cat is unlucky: that the fear of thirteen is a fear of witches by proxy. Of course, we all know that a fear of witches is really just fear of women.
Architects and superstitious Christians notwithstanding, if the internet is any indication, there seems to be something of a movement by certain goddess worshipers to reclaim Friday the thirteenth as a day of the divine feminine. Taylor Swift, born on December the thirteenth, has also made an attempt to revitalize thirteen.
I myself was born in December, during the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, a hidden sign, represented by the constellation of Ophiuchus (once Serpantarius) and that depicts a dude wrestling with a cosmic serpent…
