13 unlucky for some

More than any other number, 13 signifies danger, misfortune, mystery. It is the number of the Death card in the Tarot pack and of witches in a coven. But even if we dismiss evil associations as irrational, why do animal bites, poisonings and car accidents increase on the 13th? Jonathan Cott investigates

It was a dinner party like any other, where one of the persons seated next to you inevitably asks, "You're a writer? What do you write? How many books have you written? What are they about? Do they make any money? What are you working on now?" - the usual catechism to while away the appetiser.

In any case, one of those questions had got me thinking: How many books had I written? I counted them up in my mind. "Twelve," I replied. What was my next work? I didn't know, I said ... but it would be my 13th, I thought to myself. There was something disconcerting about that number.

I don't consider myself a superstitious person. Still, I was surprised to find myself thinking more about the sinistrous number than about a possible subject. To extirpate the incipient signs of triskaidekaphobia, I decided to telephone several friends and acquaintances to find out what they thought about the number 13.

"Thirteen is the number of a witches coven!" exclaimed one person.

"Thirteen signifies completeness or infinity," a mystical friend told me. "It is a holy number and cannot be divided. There are 12 universes, and the 13th is God."

A Spanish friend recited a Spanish proverb: "Martes trece ni te cases ni te embarques" ("Don't get married or begin a trip on Tuesday the 13th").

"I don't like to admit it," a publishing friend told me, "but I never begin anything new on the 13th of the month. And I call in sick for work on Friday the 13th."

"Don't sleep 13 in a bed," advised my aunt.

"For Miles Davis's 13th birthday," a jazz aficionado told me, "his parents gave him his first trumpet."

"When I was 13, I became a man," said a Jewish friend, remembering his bar mitzvah.

"Thirteen is the Death card in the tarot deck," someone else informed me.

"Thirteen represents the completion of a cycle," said another person, "and going out of it through death or through liberation is the 13th step."

"When the speed of the wind reaches exactly 13 miles per hour in Southern California," an acquaintance from San Diego revealed to me, "an organisation here known as 'Call of the Wind' will beep its subscribers to notify them that the surf's up. I've heard of guys," my acquaintance continued, "who were all dressed up in suits and ties, driving to work, and when they heard the beep, they made a detour for the nearest beach, stripped down to their bathing suits, and caught a wave before heading back to the office."

"In my 17 years of practice," asserted a clinical social worker at a centre for anxiety and related disorders, "I've never seen anyone's life affected by fear of the number 13. A phobia is a mental illness, 'Friday the 13th' is not. If it's really so severe, the person probably has an obsessive-compulsive disorder." (But why not so frequently about numbers like 6 or 11 or 27?)

"I never sit down to eat at a table with 12 other people," an older acquaintance declared. "Thirteen at a table is just not done."

"People are spooked by anything today," a professor friend said. "They don't want to court disaster so they stay away from the 13th floor, or whatever. Personally, I think we need a new Voltaire to set everyone straight."

Voltaire had little use for any kind of superstitions, numerical or otherwise. For him, one person's customs or beliefs were another person's superstitions. "A Frenchman travelling in Italy," he wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, "finds almost everything superstitious, and is hardly wrong. The archbishop of Canterbury claims that the archbishop of Paris is superstitious; the Presbyterians levy the same reproach against his Grace of Canterbury, and are in their turn called superstitious by the Quakers, who are the most superstitious of men in the eyes of other Christians." As Gustav Jahoda remarks in The Psychology of Superstition, "One cannot divide the peoples of the world into the superstitious and the enlightened, but only into those by and large more or less superstitious." The propensity toward superstition, said the Scottish philosopher David Hume, cannot be eradicated because it is an intrinsic part of our adaptive mechanisms of survival. But another Scotsman, Hugh Miller, saw it in a different light. To this 19th-century writer, superstitions were "the workings of that religion natural to the human heart".

It should not be surprising that numbers can be the basis of superstitious belief. The mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, born in the sixth century BC, believed that "numbers contain the secret of things". The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus asserted that "numbers exist before the objects described by them; the variety of sense objects merely recalls to the soul the notion of number." And the 20th- century architect Le Corbusier stated: "Behind the wall, the gods play. They play with numbers of which the universe is made up."

For Gnostics, Kabbalists, numerologists, and other mystics throughout the ages, numbers were a means of trying to understand, control, and manipulate reality. They developed a mystique, character, and even sexual identity of their own (the Pythagoreans classified the odd numbers as masculine, the even numbers as feminine). They embodied the rhythms of our inner and outer lives. With them, as with the combination to a safe, you could lock and unlock the mysteries. And they contained mana.

There is no doubt that the number 13 has a special kind of power - almost always negative in our culture and consciousness. My investigation of 13 soon revealed to me, to a greater extent than I might have ever imagined, that it was a number that disturbed me. When I saw it coming, I stepped aside to let it pass by; when I came upon it, I headed the other way. So I decided to explore the many curious facets of this calumniated number to find out what taboos and revelations it concealed, and to turn my superstition into my 13th book.