Embracing Superstition: Friday the 13th

Megan Hamilton (00:01.838)
I'm Megan Hamilton and this is the Embracing Enchantment Podcast. And if you're listening on the day of release, it is Friday, June 13th, 2025. How do you feel about that? If you're having some feelings of unease, be careful because you might suffer from

Paraschividae catriaphobia.

Megan Hamilton (00:18.934)
All right, what do we need to know?

Megan Hamilton (00:28.896)
Ace of Wands, Fresh Start, New Energy, Growth, Divine Intervention, Spark. If you're listening, Ace of Wands in the Rider Waite Smith deck is a hand coming out of a cloud. So that represents the Divine holding a wand, which is like a big stick with a large knob at the end of it with lots of sprigs of growth. And in this case, the growth, a lot of leaves are falling.

from the wand, which we know to be kind of...

Megan Hamilton (01:06.88)
reigning magic. There's a house in the background, kind of like a castle and mountains, mountains or wisdom. The house is your home. Sometimes you can think of that as your body. And so where are you going to embrace fresh energy today? And what do you need to do to allow it to happen? What needs to get tidied up? Where do you need to create a

vessel for this fresh energy to be able to take off.

I like that.

So let's dive in. Several years ago, I was watching a movie at my mom's house. It was about an Australian guy who had a roommate who talked about why the number 13 was a powerful number that represented women. She said that in every year, there are 13 months. She called them moonths. And in the old days, the word month came from the word moon. Women's cycles also lined up with the moon.

And the rest, I can't really remember. I remember it was something about kings, something about sacrificing kings on a Friday the 13th and about the 13, which is why some new king never wanted to have to be sacrificed. So he made the calendar into a calendar of 12 months instead of 13 moons. So.

As to the accuracy of this movie, I can't say for sure. However, there's certainly some truth to it. And I remember it was the first time it occurred to me that it seems weird to have a month based on all of these random numbers instead of actual cycles that happen in nature.

Megan Hamilton (01:59.138)
And that started me on, you know, the beginnings, I would say even of, you know, that moment where you go something that you've always just held to be true and you go, wait a minute, huh?

Is this true? Why do I think this? And we're gonna talk about that a little bit today. So I was doing research because I think it's really interesting to study or think about superstitions, what you grew up with, what associations you have with them. And also is it possible for you to reframe them for yourself?

So in 45 BC, Caesar ordered a calendar of 12 months based on a solar year, right? So 365 days. This calendar also had a cycle of three years of 365 days followed by a year of 366 days, right? Because the whole cycle is not perfect in terms of, you know,

math. It is perfect in the way that it is because it is how it is. And in fact, it was what it was way before we came along and decided we needed to, you know, get precise about it. And I know why we do that. It's easier. It's easier to create systems. It's, know, however, it's imperfect. When first implemented, the Julian calendar also moved the beginning of the year from

March 1st to January 1st. And I've been thinking about what would happen if the year began in March? Because for a lot of people,

Megan Hamilton (04:02.538)
March does bring with it the idea of a new year, right? Spring, the leaving behind of the old, the winter, the dead, you know, life and death cycles, and then like preparing for the new freshness, the fresh energy, the growth, all of the stuff that comes. I mean, you know, we've done a number on our environment over the last century, and as a result, seasons are not necessarily happening the way they used to. However,

moving it from March to January is interesting. And then now I'm wondering about the Ides of March and if there's something about that. Anyway, that's that's another rabbit hole go down another day and possibly not for this podcast, just for my own ADHD rabbit hole excitement. So the number 13 is considered an unlucky number.

I don't consider it an unlucky number at all. In fact, I consider it to be quite a lucky number for myself. And all you need to do is Google Taylor Swift and 13 to get a comprehensive breakdown of all of the ways she has created significance around that number, right? And of course she's born on December 13th.

Feel however you want about Taylor Swift. She is a huge cultural.

I to say monolith, but I mean, over the last few years, it's become bananas. so thinking about how much she has incorporated the number 13 into things is quite fascinating. Even if I remember correctly, because my daughter was so excited when her record came out last year, the double record, I think that added up.

Megan Hamilton (06:02.958)
The number of songs is 26, which is 2 times 13. So there's lots of significance of this 13 in Taylor Swift lore and.

Megan Hamilton (06:16.948)
almost as a reclamation of feeling some kind of nervousness around 13. And let's talk a little bit more about other ways that we've seen nervousness or superstition around the number 13.

Megan Hamilton (06:36.48)
At some point and maybe right from the beginning, a lot of places with elevators did not include 13 as a floor. It would just go from 12 to 14. I have a very specific memory of this when I was little, saying to my parents like, there's no floor 13 and learning that that was a superstition and understanding that this superstition was so widespread that like

giant buildings didn't want to have a floor 13. And then apparently in America, only one in six buildings with an elevator have a 13th floor. And I'm trying to remember there's only one building I lived in and in my life that had that I had to take an elevator to get to my place in Toronto. I cannot remember.

if it had a floor 13 or not. And as many as 14 million people in America have a superstition around the number 13. Okay, I don't remember how many people live in America right now, but I'm gonna guess this is like one in five, at least.

Megan Hamilton (07:52.536)
Where does this come from?

And the bigger question I have is.

What are we missing about this? Okay, so we know, you know, in, in, we know how prevalent

Megan Hamilton (08:14.83)
Christian religion is in culture of North America specifically, but also around the world. so, you know, the last supper, there were 13 guests. I think the last person was number 13 was Judas who ended up betraying Jesus, right? So, okay, that's 13 bad. In Norse mythology, the God

Loki was the 13th to arrive at a feast in Valhalla. And he tricked somebody to killing the god Balder. That's interesting, right? 13 supper. I mean, also, if you think about it at a table, 13 guests is going to be kind of hard to place well.

But here's some other stuff that's interesting. Because 13 didn't always have to be and wasn't always a negative number. In fact, recognizing the 13 moon cycles as a year, as an annual course, was widely how things were done. of course, if we're looking at moon cycles, are.

associating with feminine energy because women cycles are this usually the same as the moon cycle and not necessarily on the exact same time, but 28 days. Interesting.

In indigenous culture, and this was something I learned recently and was just like floored by, they often associate calendars with turtles because a lot of turtles have 13 segments of their shell. So the 13 moon cycles of a year, but then also have 28 subsections going around. Not all turtles.

Megan Hamilton (10:24.878)
Look this up, however, is not interesting. 28 days. Of a 13 cycle. That doesn't seem evil. Or worrisome. And then this article in Vice shows up in my research. And I'm not going to lie, I kind of knew this anyways, but here we go.

The article if you want to look it up is called how the patriarchy stole Friday the 13th from women and made it evil. I mean that's pretty on the nose. But Friday the 13th specifically used to be considered the day of the goddess. Interesting. It was considered a day to worship the divine feminine that lives in all of us and to honor the cycles of creation and death and rebirth.

interesting because we go back to what I mentioned earlier with Caesar changing the calendar to have the start of the year go from March to January 1st. Where if you think about it, March would be a natural beginning to a new year. And as I said before, a lot of people still sort of regard that as their new year.

if you're working with nature, if you're working with...

natural cycles, not just everything made up.

Megan Hamilton (12:07.682)
We know that is the average number of a woman's cycle in a year corresponding with the number of cycles of the moon, which we also associate with feminine energy. I said that before. And then remember that word I mentioned at the beginning, paraskevide katriaphobia, that is, you probably guessed it, a fear of Friday the 13th. And the word paraskevi generally means

preparation or readiness and it's associated with the Greek word for Friday. Okay. And it's also used as a woman's name in Greece.

Megan Hamilton (12:51.296)
Interesting. So where is all of this association with feminine energy creating enough of some kind of worry that we got to switch around everything that naturally feels cyclical and corresponding and working with

the natural rhythms that we exist within and instead we gotta mess with it and why?

Megan Hamilton (13:35.71)
One of the things that I've been doing a lot of lately and really have been for a while is deconstructing.

Megan Hamilton (13:46.472)
But what I mean by that is all of these things that we hold to be true.

Megan Hamilton (13:53.646)
asking instead, is it true? And so that could mean stuff like

I took a course with Jessica door on deconstructing the tarot. And if you don't know Jessica doors work, Tarot for Change is her book. It is a masterpiece. She is a seminal figure for me in terms of how I read tarot, the way I look at tarot specifically.

But you know, one of her questions in this deconstructing the tarot is, okay, tarot is made of archetypes, is it? And then beyond that, are archetypes helpful? Are they real? Or are they just other ways, further ways of like lumping a bunch of people into one particular category so that we as humans can make easier sense of it because our brains like to categorize.

And then I've been thinking, do our brains like to categorize?

Megan Hamilton (15:03.902)
Or do our brains like to categorize because somewhere along the lines, some people got scared of the way that we coexisted with the natural world and wanted to change that possibly out of fear of disempowering certain groups of people that maybe weren't aligning in the way that they want them to.

Hmm.

Megan Hamilton (15:38.23)
I mean, we know from every bit of modern research that's been done on gender, that gender is a construct. That all of the ways that we feel like ourselves are based on really old science that actually, again, was averaged out.

in order to make things fit nicely in a box. And I'm talking specifically about hormones and also chromosomes. This is a whole, that's another rabbit hole if you want to, if you care to go in and look it up, it's very, very interesting. So what's the point here? I don't remember when I stopped worrying about Friday the 13th.

and instead started to see it as an empowering thing, but I did. And I'm now inviting you to, if you're curious about this, or if what I've started to talk about in terms of deconstruction is interesting to you, here's what you can do.

And you're not going to want to do it all the time. But probably once you start looking at one thing, it's going to lead to another thing. Every time a concept comes up that you have taken to be true, you can ask yourself, is it true or why do we do it this way? Especially if another way seems to make more sense. So you can start to think about stuff like looking at.

how certain mental health diagnoses play out.

Megan Hamilton (17:33.586)
So we know that a lot of research that's been done was done on men. This is for mental health and also for, you know, drugs and medicine. The reason being women's hormones make things tricky. You know, this is not just like.

Me saying this is across the board. I saw something recently. it Jen Gunter? I can't remember it like. no, was Michelle Obama's new. Podcast, somebody on it said they didn't start doing research on women or didn't become mandated, I guess, until like the 1990s or the early 2000s. Like it's it's bananas. And so all of these, you know, like how heart attacks.

present themselves very different in women than it is in men. So a lot of women who were having heart attacks were told that it wasn't that they were making it up or presented differently.

Megan Hamilton (18:38.508)
And so because of this clear

discrepancy. Let's use a nice word that has occurred for millennia at this point. I encourage you. It's not question everything and nothing is true, but it might be, boy, this really doesn't work for me, but I've always had to do it this way. Okay, do I have to do it this way? Why is it like this? What would help?

happen if I did it in a way that was more supportive for me.

and start to tease out the places in your life where you might be unknowingly holding up the patriarchy and ask questions, look things up, use reputable sources. There are so many conspiracy theories out there. AI is definitely not perfect in terms of facts. So, you know, be careful with where you're looking stuff up. But. You know.

Where can you start to question things that have been given to you as facts? And look, I believe in facts. I love science. I am also very weird and think a lot of weird stuff, as I'm assuming you do if you're listening to this podcast.

Megan Hamilton (20:15.008)
because I think one of the things that's happening right now.

collectively in our.

immediate consciousness and perhaps sort of a, you know, collective unconscious is a great unraveling. As we see things play out before us, not happening the way they're supposed to. People who claim to be a certain way end up being not actually that way. As we're seeing all of this happen,

What might help you to be able to feel like you're not falling apart at the same time is to just start questioning your beliefs. Where do they come from? What do they mean? What are the implications of this?

because the more we get comfortable in our own sovereignty of thought, the more we can see what's happening before us and not feel completely disempowered, but instead feel as though we are the owners of how we see things and how we're going to go about things.

Megan Hamilton (21:35.36)
I'd love to know what you think of this. Head on over to EmbracingEnchantment.com. In the bottom right corner is a cute little microphone. And you can leave me a voice note and I might share it.

Megan Hamilton (21:50.51)
All right. You can find all the information and takeaways from today's episode in the show notes or at embracing enchantment dot com. And while you're there, leave us that voice note I was just talking about. Subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcast. And we'd love for you to leave a review. You're going to want to make sure you're subscribed. Listen to me. Oh, my goodness. The next episode is a banger. I it is a

It is really, really good. It is it is amazing. OK. You're going to to make sure you're subscribed because we have an exciting episode coming up with a three time Grammy Award nominated musician. You can catch up on previous episodes where we talk with award winning author and host of the Witchwave podcast, Pam Grossman. Incredible conversation. The horoscope writer for Cosmo Dotcom and them

Colin Bedell. Also, incredible conversation. He was the first guest on the pod. The question of whether magic is real and so much more. Until then, I hope you have a very lucky day.

And here's to building an enchanted life.