October 13, 2010

Lucky thirteen.

Years ago, I bought myself a ring with the tiniest diamonds ever to have been set in a ring. They're so tiny, I literally have to hold the ring up to my eyeball to see them. I'm certain the jeweler must have been an elf or a sprite or something equally tiny.

Each little speck of diamond is set into a leaf that makes up the band of the ring. Thirteen little leaves with thirteen little diamonds.

Sarah would be proud.

Sarah Winchester was, above all else, an occultist. The heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune, Sarah consulted mediums and psychics and was told that she would be forever cursed by those killed by the Winchester Rifle (that's a fair few haunts, I'm guessing) unless she moved west and built a house. And kept building.

Build she did. For 38 years she built, often without the help of architects or engineers. Some believe the plans she drew by hand were dictated to her in her "seance room" by the very spirits she meant to appease.

The number 13 appears in the house's design over and over: windows with 13 panes, staircases with 13 steps, 13 bathrooms. Chandeliers that were originally manufactured with a dozen arms were reworked to have 13.

Thirteen is a magic number. We can speculate that the cultural significance of 13 comes from early cultures that relied on a lunar calendar. When followed, the lunar calendar offers twelve full months and one, shorter, bonus month.

Traditionally, there are 13 steps to the gallows, 13 players of a rugby team and there are a whole bunch of 13s built into the Great Seal of the United States. Conspiracy theorists always want to blame that one on the Masons.

Then there's that thing about the Pope issuing an order for the Templar Knights to be rounded up on Friday the 13th.

Here's a fun one from Newsweek's Charles Panati specifically about Friday the 13th, but I think we can use it here:

The actual origin of the superstition, though, appears also to be a tale in Norse mythology. Friday is named for Frigga, the free-spirited goddess of love and fertility. When Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday, the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with eleven other witches, plus the devil — a gathering of thirteen — and plotted ill turns of fate for the coming week. For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was known as "Witches' Sabbath.

Happy Wednesday the 13th.