[COLOR=red]Other sources speculate that the number 13 may have been purposely vilified by the founders of patriarchal religions in the early days of western civilization because it represented femininity. Thirteen had been revered in prehistoric goddess-worshiping cultures, we are told, because it corresponded to the number of lunar (menstrual) cycles in a year (13 x 28 = 364 days). The “Earth Mother of Laussel,” for example — a 27,000-year-old carving found near the Lascaux caves in France often cited as an icon of matriarchal spirituality — depicts a female figure holding a cresent-shaped horn bearing 13 notches. As the solar calendar triumphed over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated civilization, it is surmised, so did the number 12 over the number 13, thereafter considered anathema. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]On the other hand, one of the earliest concrete taboos associated with the number 13 — a taboo still observed by some superstitious folks today, evidently — is said to have originated in the East with the Hindus, who believed, for reasons I haven’t been able to ascertain, that it is always unlucky for 13 people to gather in one place — say, at dinner. Interestingly enough, precisely the same superstition has been attributed to the ancient Vikings (though I have also been told, for what it’s worth, that this and the accompanying mythographical explanation are apocryphal). The story has been laid down as follows: [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red][B]Loki, the Evil One[/B] [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the Evil One, god of mischief, had been left off the guest list but crashed the party, bringing the total number of attendees to 13. True to character, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind god of winter, to attack Balder the Good, who was a favorite of the gods. Hod took a spear of mistletoe offered by Loki and obediently hurled it at Balder, killing him instantly. All Valhalla grieved. And although one might take the moral of this story to be “Beware of uninvited guests bearing mistletoe,” the Norse themselves apparently concluded that 13 people at a dinner party is just plain bad luck. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]As if to prove the point, the Bible tells us there were exactly 13 present at the Last Supper. One of the dinner guests — er, disciples — betrayed Jesus Christ, setting the stage for the Crucifixion. [/COLOR][COLOR=red]Did I mention the Crucifixion took place on a Friday? [/COLOR]
[B][SIZE=2][COLOR=red]Bad Friday[/COLOR][/SIZE][/B]

[COLOR=red][I]It is said: Never change your bed on Friday; it will bring bad dreams. Don’t start a trip on Friday or you will have misfortune. If you cut your nails on Friday, you cut them for sorrow. Ships that set sail on a Friday will have bad luck – as in the tale of H.M.S. Friday … One hundred years ago, the British government sought to quell once and for all the widespread superstition among seamen that setting sail on Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned, named “H.M.S. Friday.” They laid her keel on a Friday, launched her on a Friday, selected her crew on a Friday and hired a man named Jim Friday to be her captain. To top it off, H.M.S. Friday embarked on her maiden voyage on a Friday, and was never seen or heard from again.[/I] [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]Some say Friday’s bad reputation goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. It was on a Friday, supposedly, that Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned in Sunday School, and they were both ejected from Paradise. Tradition also holds that the Great Flood began on a Friday; God tongue-tied the builders of the Tower of Babel on a Friday; the Temple of Solomon was destroyed on a Friday; and, of course, Friday was the day of the week on which Christ was crucified. It is therefore a day of penance for Christians. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]In pagan Rome, Friday was execution day (later Hangman’s Day in Britain), but in other pre-Christian cultures it was the sabbath, a day of worship, so those who indulged in secular or self-interested activities on that day could not expect to receive blessings from the gods — which may explain the lingering taboo on embarking on journeys or starting important projects on Fridays. [/COLOR][COLOR=red]To complicate matters, these pagan associations were not lost on the early Church, which went to great lengths to suppress them. If Friday was a holy day for heathens, the Church fathers felt, it must not be so for Christians — thus it became known in the Middle Ages as the “Witches’ Sabbath,” and thereby hangs another tale. [/COLOR]

[COLOR=red][B]The Witch-Goddess[/B] [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]The name “Friday” was derived from a Norse deity worshipped on the sixth day, known either as Frigg (goddess of marriage and fertility), or Freya (goddess of sex and fertility), or both, the two figures having become intertwined in the handing-down of myths over time (the etymology of “Friday” has been given both ways). Frigg/Freya corresponded to Venus, the goddess of love of the Romans, who named the sixth day of the week in her honor “[I]dies Veneris[/I].” [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]Friday was actually considered quite lucky by pre-Christian Teutonic peoples, we are told — especially as a day to get married — because of its traditional association with love and fertility. All that changed when Christianity came along. The goddess of the sixth day — most likely Freya in this context, given that the cat was her sacred animal — was recast in post-pagan folklore as a witch, and her day became associated with evil doings. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]Various legends developed in that vein, but one is of particular interest: As the story goes, the witches of the north used to observe their sabbath by gathering in a cemetery in the dark of the moon. On one such occasion the Friday goddess, Freya herself, came down from her sanctuary in the mountaintops and appeared before the group, who numbered only 12 at the time, and gave them one of her cats, after which the witches’ coven — and, by tradition, every properly-formed coven since — comprised exactly 13. [/COLOR][I][COLOR=#236eb5][/COLOR][/I]

[B][SIZE=2][COLOR=red]The Unluckiest Day of All[/COLOR][/SIZE][/B]

[COLOR=red]The astute reader will have observed that while we have thus far insinuated any number of intriguing connections between events, practices and beliefs attributed to ancient cultures and the superstitious fear of Fridays and the number 13, we have yet to happen upon an explanation of how, why or when these separate strands of folklore converged — if that is indeed what happened — to mark Friday the 13th as the unluckiest day of all. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]There’s a very simple reason for that — nobody really knows, though various explanations have been proposed. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red][B]The Knights Templar[/B] [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]One theory, recently offered up as historical fact in the novel [I]The Da Vinci Code[/I], holds that it came about not as the result of a convergence, but a catastrophe, a single historical event that happened nearly 700 years ago. The catastrophe was the decimation of the [/COLOR][URL=”http://historymedren.about.com/cs/templars/index.htm”%5D%5BCOLOR=red%5DKnights Templar[/COLOR][/URL][COLOR=red], the legendary order of “warrior monks” formed during the Christian Crusades to combat Islam. Renowned as a fighting force for 200 years, by the 1300s the order had grown so pervasive and powerful it was perceived as a political threat by kings and popes alike and brought down by a church-state conspiracy, as recounted by Katharine Kurtz in [I]Tales of the Knights Templar[/I] (Warner Books: 1995): [/COLOR][LIST][I][COLOR=red]”On October 13, 1307, a day so infamous that Friday the 13th would become a synonym for ill fortune, officers of King Philip IV of France carried out mass arrests in a well-coordinated dawn raid that left several thousand Templars — knights, sergeants, priests, and serving brethren — in chains, charged with heresy, blasphemy, various obscenities, and homosexual practices. None of these charges was ever proven, even in France — and the Order was found innocent elsewhere — but in the seven years following the arrests, hundreds of Templars suffered excruciating tortures intended to force ‘confessions,’ and more than a hundred died under torture or were executed by burning at the stake.”[/COLOR][/I][/LIST]
[COLOR=red][B]A Thoroughly Modern Phenomenon[/B] [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]There are drawbacks to the “day so infamous” thesis, not the least of which is that it attributes enormous cultural significance to a relatively obscure historical event. Even more problematic, for this or any other theory positing premodern origins for Friday the 13th superstitions, is the fact that no one has been able to document the existence of such beliefs prior to the 19th century. If people who lived before the late 1800s perceived Friday the 13th as a day of special misfortune, no evidence has been found to prove it. As a result, some scholars are now convinced the stigma is a thoroughly modern phenomenon exacerbated by 20th-century media hype. [/COLOR][COLOR=red]Going back a hundred years, Friday the 13th doesn’t even merit a mention in E. Cobham Brewer’s voluminous 1898 edition of the [I]Dictionary of Phrase and Fable[/I], though one does find entries for “[/COLOR][URL=”http://clk.about.com/?zi=1/XJ&sdn=urbanlegends&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bartleby.com%2F81%2F6833.html”%5D%5BCOLOR=red%5DFriday, an Unlucky Day[/COLOR][/URL][COLOR=red]” and “[/COLOR][URL=”http://clk.about.com/?zi=1/XJ&sdn=urbanlegends&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bartleby.com%2F81%2F16422.html”%5D%5BCOLOR=red%5DThirteen Unlucky[/COLOR][/URL][COLOR=red].” When the date of ill fate finally does make an appearance in later editions of the text, it is without extravagant claims as to the superstition’s historicity or longevity. The very brevity of the entry is instructive: “A particularly unlucky Friday. See [I]Thirteen[/I]” — implying that the extra dollop of misfortune attributed to Friday the 13th can be accounted for in terms of an accrual, so to speak, of bad omens: [/COLOR]
[INDENT][COLOR=red]Unlucky Friday + Unlucky 13 = Unluckier Friday. [/COLOR][/INDENT][COLOR=red]If that’s the case, we are guilty of perpetuating a misnomer by labeling Friday the 13th “the unluckiest day of all,” a designation perhaps better reserved for, say, a Friday the 13th on which one breaks a mirror, walks under a ladder, spills the salt, and spies a black cat crossing one’s path — a day, if there ever was one, best spent in the safety of one’s own home with doors locked, shutters closed and fingers crossed[/COLOR]

[B]

[COLOR=red]FRIDAY[/COLOR][/B]

[B][COLOR=red]The Day of the Love
The Day of Venus[/COLOR][/B]

[COLOR=red][/COLOR][B][COLOR=red]frigedaeg or frige dag (Anglo-Saxon)
freitag (Germanic)
dies veneris (Latin)
sukra-var (Hindu)
juma (Islamic)
vendredi (French)
kin youbi (Japanese) [/COLOR]
[/B]

[COLOR=red]This is traditionally the sixth day of the week. The name given to this day in ancient Rome was ‘dies Veneris’ as is was a day dedicated to Venus. Later the French named the day ‘Vendredi’ believed to have derived from the same origin. In northern countries the closest equivalent to the Goddess Venus was ‘Frigg’ or ‘Freya’ with the day becoming known by the Anglo-Saxons as ‘Frige dag’, later to Friday. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]Traditionally associated in many parts of Europe with misfortune as this was believed to be the day when Christ was crucified at Calvary, and also that this was the day that Adam was tempted by Eve with the Forbidden Fruit. Within the Roman Catholic faith Friday was traditionally a day of abstinence. Today it is a still viewed as a day for some private act of self-denial [B](For further information see [URL=”http://www.mystical-www.co.uk/easter.htm”%5DMystical WWW Easter[/URL])[/B]. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]According to tradition there are some practices that should be avoided if possible on a Friday including, births, weddings, the sailing of a ship, cutting your nails or starting a new job. This is indicated in the following rhyme: [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red][/COLOR][COLOR=red]’Whoever be born on [B]Friday[/B] or it’s night,
He shall be accursed of men,
Silly and crafty and loathsome to all men,
And shall ever be thinking evil in his heart,
And shall be a thief and a great coward,
And shall not live longer than to middle age.’ [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]A contradiction is expressed if a child was born on this day in [I]’Days of the Week'[/I], which indicated a more favourable omen. And indeed it is said that in 1492 Columbus set sail and sighted land on a Friday. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]In Hungarian (Europe) folklore it was believed be an omen of bad luck to be born on a Friday although it was believed that the onset of misfortune could be avoided or removed by placing some of your own blood on some of your own old clothing and then burning it. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]The criminal underworld have an old belief that ‘a burglary committed on a Friday will probably result in arrest’ as perhaps a sign of divine intervention and retribution upon the criminal, and if you were bought to trial for any offence on a Friday it was thought to be a bad omen. In the British Isles and USA Friday was the customary day to carry-out hangings and so was sometimes referred to as ‘Hangman’s Day’ or ‘Hanging Day’. (This perhaps is connected to the Christian belief in a Friday being the worst day of the week, as this was the day identified with the Crucifixion and the death of Christ). [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]If it rains on a Friday an old rural belief (UK) was that it indicated the forecast would be fine on the following Sunday. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]If you dreamt on a Friday night of an event or people and then told the content of the dream to someone in your family on the Saturday morning it was more likely to happen. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]In Scotland (UK) and Germany (Europe) according to an old belief Friday was thought to be a good day to go courting (dating). Norse men traditionally saw this as a positive day, the luckiest of the week. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]’Black Friday’ has been regularly used to label days of significance within the British culture. This was the name given to December 6 1745 in the British Isles. This was the day that information reached London (UK) that the Young Pretender had reached Derby (UK). The threatened General Strike was cancelled on 15 April 1921 affecting the stance of the British Labour Movement (UK). The Government (USA) flooded the open market with gold to bring down prices on 24 September 1869 ruining the livelihoods of many speculators in USA. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=red]Mohammedans believe that Adam was created on a Friday, and so the day is seen to be the Sabbath. It is also believed that Eve tempted Adam with the Forbidden Fruit on this day, and that later both died on a Friday. [/COLOR][COLOR=red]Friday is believed to be a day of misfortune too for Buddhists and Brahmins.[/COLOR]

[QUOTE]way to much data… Thanks dave..[/QUOTE]

[COLOR=red]I need a hobby or a job or something[/COLOR]
[COLOR=#ff0000][/COLOR]
:rolleyes: