The Story Of How Friday The 13th Became Known As Bad Luck
It’s Friday The 13th. A day where shit gets FUCKED up in popular culture and urban legend. It’s associated with bad omens, bad luck, bad juju, and scary ass murderer slasher movies
I am always fascinated by how these myths get started. Of all the days in the calendar to get tagged with horror, why is it universally known to be Friday The 13th? Well it didn’t start with the guy above. It started with this movie
The Da Vinci Code was on Encore this morning, and it dives into some of the myth surrounding the Knights Templar and the history of Friday The 13th being unlucky starts with them.
The Knights Templar was a group in the Middle Ages who protected Pilgrims on their way the Holy Lands in Jerusalem, Syria, Egypt, etc after the Crusades. Lots of people in Europe wanted spends like a full year traveling across Europe to be like “yep, there it is, that’s where Jesus died and there’s King Solomon’s Temple. Okay let’s go home”. But you couldn’t get all the way there without getting robbed by people along the way so in comes the Knight’s Templar to help insure your safety.
They were part bad ass Knights, part monks, and part multi-national banking association. They are often actually credited with modern banking. Somehow in the 1200s you could make a deposit of gold in London, travel by fucking donkey all the way to Jerusalem, and then make a withdrawel. How that actually worked I have no idea, but it happened. Through this banking, and bad ass Knight-ing, and answering to nobody except the Pope in Rome, the Knights Templar got EXTREMELY rich and powerful. They had hubs all over Europe and the Holy Lands.
They’d loan money out to everyone, including monarchs in Europe. Monarch’s like King Philip IV of France.
That’s King Philip IV. He looks mad in that picture. Probably because he owed the Knights Templar a fuck ton of money because he was always trying to fight wars against England and much of the leadership of the Knights Templar had relocated to France. And dealing with Templars and the Pope was a little like Paulie from Goodfellas
Pope Boniface suddenly died(wink wink) and the new Pope, Clement was real chummy with King Philip IV. King Philip got the idea that it would be a lot easier to just charge the Knights Templar with heresy(the Knights Templar were into some freaky shit) and have them murdered than actually have to pay them. The new Pope thought that was a swell idea and so on October Friday The 13th, 1307 rounded up all the Templars they could, had them murdered, seized all their lands and riches. And because they were “heretics” (wink wink), King Philip and his new buddy Pope Clement weren’t murderous thieves. They were noble servants of God just doing God’s work by murdering a bunch of rich monks and taking all of their shit. And ever since then Friday the 13th has been considered unlucky. Very unlucky if you’re in the Knights Templar for sure.