So next Friday, work takes me off to the antipodes, to be poisoned either by spiders that lurk in shady corners even in cities (!) or by evil jellyfish that either (i) are small enough to swim through protective nets at beaches, or (ii) reach through protective nets with meters-long tentacles (all according to my travel guide that tries to get people to go there!) And my colleagues have been quite horrified that I am leaving on Friday the 13th. Is there quite as noxious a superstition about this in Britain as there is here? Anyway, after pooh-poohing this notion, tonight I was checking the liturgical calendar (NO) for the time I would be away. So whose commemorations are on (Friday) 13 September? My very own pseudonymous patron saint, St. Notburga (yes, I am very bad about remembering saints’ days), and: St. Tobit and St. Tobias. Well…
September 11, 2013
Holy irony
Posted by notburga under diarification, down south, gruntled, Peregrinatio, Uncategorized, Who knows what's down the road?[4] Comments
Laodicea 
September 11, 2013 at 8:04 am
I have heard that 13 was considered a blessed number in England before the Reformation, as being the number of Christ+the apostles, but that the Reformers attacked the idea as part of their war on ‘folk religion’, and that the consequence of this was that people eventually began to fear the number 13. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know.
September 11, 2013 at 9:47 pm
Interesting. I did not know about this. Quite contrarily, I thought that Judas being, as it were, number thirteen contributed to the number being thought unlucky.
Be that as it may, I think that the question whether there is anything to that superstition has been most conclusively answered by Our Lady in Fatima.
September 11, 2013 at 11:57 pm
In a similar vein, I have heard that walking under ladders was not considered unlucky till after the Reformation, when reformers put it about so as to undermine the traditional Catholic piety that it was a good thing to do because it reminded us of the ladders used to crucify Our Lord and take Him down from the Cross. Again, I don’t know if it is true.
September 12, 2013 at 9:51 pm
Good luck on you journey!
May St Notburga and Tobit and Tobias protect you so you don’t get eaten by spiders or jellyfish or anything else!
(And by the way, I was born on a Friday the 13th, so it can’t be such a bad day! 🙂 )