All my life, and probably yours, the number 7 has been the lucky one. And the number 13 is always the unlucky one. Today I wonder why? Is it because 13 is a prime number? No, can’t be that. 7 is also a prime number.

I don’t pretend to believe in luck in the first place, so I’m not really biased whether thirteen is better or worse than seven. But I do like numbers and math, so I really wonder what’s so bad about the number thirteen. Really. I mean, a number is a number. If you think about it, thirteen isn’t much different than seven. Neither number is much different than the number one. 7 just happens to have that many ones in it. Same with thirteen.

So after a little bit of research, I’ve found the root of this issue. My info is based on wikipedia, so take this to be as accurate as you like. The info wasn’t on a page called ‘unlucky thirteen’ or anything similar. It was on a page titled ‘Triskaidekaphobia‘! You get that? Triskaidekaphobia!

After reading through this page a bit, I realized that the thirteen scare traces back further than I ever could’ve thought! Some say it’s because Judas at Jesus’ Last Supper was the thirteenth to sit down. Others think it’s due to the Vikings, and their 13th god, Loki.

Some think that Triskaidekaphobia can be traced even further back to the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. Now that’s quite a while ago! They think that Ancient Persians were all about a twelve month Zodiac, where one of each twelve constellations controlled each of the twelve months, respectively. So the 13th would be responsible for chaos, since it’s outside of the scope of the twelve constellations.

So this superstition goes back quite a while, and I had no idea of the history of all this. It’s strange that the superstition arises in several cultures, which are pretty much unrelated.

So could we infer that the age thirteen was really crappy for these reasons? I remember those teen years, and I wouldn’t redo them!