Data released from the NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information has revealed that was the hottest month in our lifetime, with the temperature being the highest in 142 years of records.
The Earth has experience a significant number of environmental issues over the past few months with a concerning increase in heat waves and fires around the world and flash floods in Germany, Belgium and China.
The report published by the United Nations’ IPCC has also stated that “each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850”.
The increased temperatures has also contributed to extreme weather conditions around the global, with Malta expected to experience intense Autumn storms due to such high temperatures.
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An interesting fact is that the Gregorian calendar, the one we all use on a daily basis, makes the 13th day of any month slightly more likely to fall on a Friday rather than any other day of the week. There are however other superstitions related to the number 13 and other days across the globe, with Greek and Spanish speaking countries fearing Tuesday the 13th and Italians fearing Friday the 17th.
As a superstition, its origins is intertwined with myths, fables and religions. Many pinpoint to the Last Supper in the Bible as being a possible event which solidified the superstition. This is because the 13th guest at the table, including Jesus Christ, was Judas Iscariot. Given the events that followed the last supper, it wouldn’t come as a surprise that the number of that specific guest would be attributed to some sort of misfortune.
In the 19th century, Friday the 13th was made synonymous with misfortune. For Steve Road explains, the connection between 13 and Friday is a Victorian invention as in the popular novel ‘Friday, the Thirteenth’, a broker takes advantage of the superstitions around the date to crash the stock market.
The 1980s then saw a hockey-masked killer named Jason Voorhees in the slasher flick franchise ‘Friday the 13th’ murder innocent victims. In 2003, Dan Brown continued to make the date more haunting as he incorrectly stated that the superstition originated with the arrests of hundreds of members of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13th, 1307.
Some, however, have reinvented the definition of the number 13. Pop singer artist Taylor Swift, for example, considers the number 13 as lucky, performing on stage with the number drawn on her hand. Like all such things, the associations with 13, Friday and the combination of the two evolves according to how cultures change over time. We might not have a definite answer as to how Friday the 13th became such a haunting concept, but we do know that it has had a powerful impact on cultures globally.
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