Washington (H24N). This weekend was figuring to be a scary one, and any triskaidekaphobic can tell you why: Friday the 13^th. Sure it’s just a superstition, but one that just about all adults know the meaning of, or do they?

The psychoanalyst Charles Brenner explains in his Textbook of Psychoanalysis that the fear of the number 13 is in fact Christian in origin. It comes from the Last Supper, when Jesus and his 12 disciples sat together the last night before he was crucified, which happened on a Friday. So, the fear goes, if 13 people get together, something ominous will befall one of them.

Brenner goes on: "It is interesting to speculate about the unconscious meaning of 13 to the many who fear it will bring bad luck without having the least knowledge of the origin of the superstition and of its relation to the Last Supper. Whatever one is feeling guilty about unconsciously can give rise to a consciously inexplicable, or irrational expectation of misfortune, an expectation which one may try to allay magically."

When we are afraid, we feel that there are powers greater than ourselves. We can’t move ahead because there are things that make us afraid and make us worry. They are our own personal Friday the 13ths and we may not have any great antidotes.

According to Judith Marks, Ph.D., professor of history at Tulane University, many of the superstitions modern western people hold dear – including the beliefs that 13 is an unlucky number, our human fates are tied to the patterns of the stars and black cats are evil – originated more than 5,000 years ago in the Middle East – Mesopotamia in particular.

"The fact that everything is sevens, 12s and 40s in the Old Testament, of course, is because those were considered good or lucky numbers in Mesopotamia," Marks said, "and so you see them over and over and over in the Bible."

Because 13 came after lucky number 12, it was associated with evil. "There are a lot of legends going on about the 12 apostles of Christ, and that the 13^th member at the Last Supper was bad," Marks said, "but these would be much later ideas, after the number 13 was already established as bad."

In addition to retaining the belief that 13 is unlucky, Marks pointed out the belief in the luck that number seven holds, especially in games of chance. "Although these are really ancient Middle Eastern superstitions and beliefs, we still kind of like them," she said.

According to Charles Kulchiski, Ph.D., chief of behavioral sciences at Washington University, in St. Louis, Mo., superstitions are formed when people erroneously draw connections between neutral phenomena and good or bad events in their lives that immediately follow those phenomena.

"Who knows how our superstitions got started in the beginning, but maybe somebody had a black cat cross their path, and then something bad happened to them, so they connected the two," Kulchiski said.

For the most part, Kulchiski said, superstitions are a normal response to our often-random world. He added that even animals have been shown to display superstitious learning, citing pigeons that developed elaborate "rituals," designed to elicit a food reward during a controlled experiment.

Kulchiski said humans invent their own rituals to create a desired result or to stave off an undesired result. "I’ve seen some guys on the softball team that have a certain warm-up routine they do every time, or there are the people who play bingo, who bring all their lucky dolls and stuff with them," he said.

"Superstitions in a culture’s collective consciousness can be self-perpetuating, because people look for anything that can support their belief in the superstition," Kulchiski said.

"If you have a superstition about Friday the 13^th, you’re going to look for something bad to happen to you that day, and you’re going to pay attention to it," Kulchiski said. "Bad things can happen on other days than Friday the 13^th, but that doesn’t count, because it doesn’t reinforce any belief," Kulchiski said. "Then again, maybe black cats and Friday the 13^th are bad, and they’re actually causing bad things to happen to people – but I have my doubts."

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