Friday the 13th
Today is judged unlucky by many. It is the weekday named for the goddess, Frigg, mother and matron of the Norse. She is wife to Odin, the wanderer and all-father in the Nordic pantheon. She is mother to Baldur, the golden summer lord who dies from a dart of mistletoe wielded by her other son, the blind god, Hodr. Frigg is sometimes confused with Freya, the Vanir goddess of passion and war, but this may be no more than a modern inability to hear the difference in their names. Their personalities were wildly different.
Frigg presided over the home, over married women, over birth and over hearth magic. She created the seidr, the tools of healing and foresight. She was accounted wise and steadfast, giving sound advice and remaining calm in the midst of upheaval. She fiercely protected her children and all those who called on her. But she was a quiet deity. She watched and saw all, but she rarely spoke. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that her words are seldom found in the sagas. She was a woman, unconcerned with the affairs of men, taking pains to avoid war and passion — unlike Freya who courted chaos — and so the scribes were uninterested in what she represented.
Over time, particularly under the influence of the sky gods of desert and steppe, Frigg was relegated to the inferior realm of woman-things. But there is a memory of feminine power and mystery that cloaks Frigg, and domestic deities like Frigg, in frightening shadows. It is not enough to forget these strong and, more importantly, uncontrolled feminine deities; they and the women who honored the womanly divine must be silenced.
Mortal women were easily censored. A few burnings in a community and the rest of the women rigidly policed themselves and their daughters for generations, often forgetting what it was they were forbidden to know and speak.
Deities and ideas are trickier. They are not so easy to kill. Thus men turn to ridicule and demonizing. Frigg was reduced to a pale figure in the dark corners of the home, her name hardly remembered — except in the ancient northern name of the sixth day of the week. Frigg’s symbols, particularly those associated with prophecy, were turned into evil; and evils from other cultures were heaped onto her memory — such as an association with the ill-favored number thirteen.
The number thirteen is considered unfavorable for the rather petty reason that there are thirteen moon cycles in the solar year. The cultures that most annoyed the Roman Empire were also those that followed lunisolar calendars, that is, they were not following the Roman ordering of time. They looked to the moon. And they had thirteen moons in their year.
Perhaps because they were irritatingly independent in this manner, or maybe because there was a memory of all the times that those barbaric cultures with different calendars brought down the Empire, the civilized elite viewed the moon as treacherous and capricious. Cultures that followed the moon were, likewise, deemed duplicitous, not to be trusted, uncivilized and uncivilizable. All lunar things took on this taint — including the number of months and, significantly, the number of times a woman menstruates in the year. And then, in a brutally neat trick, women and all things that men could not control — from ovulation to ordering the household to the changing face of the moon — were dumped into this bin of deceitful lunar darkness.
Thus the number thirteen is unlucky. Friday, named for the shadowy but powerful mother goddess, is similarly unlucky. Taken together, Friday the 13th is ill-luck magnified.
So today is considered unlucky.
Unless one is already… sinister… I happen to deem Friday the 13th auspicious.
And of late there have have been such interesting synchronicities.
From the autumn equinox of 2024 to the summer solstice of 2025, the 13th fell on a Friday the week before each solar event except the vernal equinox. So that was an interesting bit of dark lunar energy added to each bright solar festival. But today might beat that. This Friday the 13th is the day before the modern romantic festival of Valentine’s Day, two days before the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia and four days before we celebrate both Mardi Gras and the Lunar New Year on the same day, welcoming in spring fecundity. What a lot of passionately creative energy, with Frigg’s day leading the way! It’s almost like she planned it…
I understand how these events come together from time to time like this, but I think it’s more fun to see this as a tidal wave of the divine feminine. Frigg is showing us who is in charge.
But ok, here’s the boring math again. The earth turns on its axis once every 23 hours and 56 minutes and a handful of seconds, or one day. It takes the moon 29.5ish days to orbit the earth — a lunar month. It takes the earth 365.25ish days to orbit the sun — a solar year. So there are about 12.38 moon cycles, or lunar months, in every year. Our cycle of weeks were created to match the moon cycle as close as that is possible. However, the calendar months don’t match much of anything except February which — being the former last month of the year — is short, to make up for all the monthly overages during the rest of the year.
Obviously, we have a critical lack of whole numbers in our time keeping, so the days wobble around. We jiggle them back with our odd system of civic months, adding a day or two on to every lunar month except February, which gets all the leftover days (365 days in the solar year minus 337 days in the 11 “regular” calendar months equals 28 days for February). All this means that the 13th day of the month will fall on Friday about once every 212 days. So we have one or two Friday the Thirteenths in most calendar years. Some years we have none… but then there’s 2026 with three!
One result of all this wonky calendrifying is that February has been engineered to nearly match the lunar cycle. I am not sure that this was intentional since the Romans had no love for the moon, but there it is. In any case, allotting 28 days to February has the side effect of causing March dates to fall on the same weekday as February (except in Leap Years). And this means that if there is a February Friday the 13th, 13 March will also fall on a Friday. So we have two Friday the Thirteenths in a row in 2026 — and next month’s bonanza is the week before the equinox, no less!
And then, because math, we get another Friday the 13th in November.
Whether you deem Friday the 13th auspicious or pernicious, that’s a lot of luck for one year…
Parentalia
As February marked the last month in the ancient Roman calendar, the Romans spent this time of year setting themselves in accord with the world. The 9-day festival of Parentalia began on 13 February and culminated with the day of Feralia, which began at sundown on the 21st. Parentalia was a sacred time to commune with the ancestors, specifically the private family ancestors, as the name indicates.
The Vestal Virgins opened the holidays with a public ritual, but after that Rome retreated behind closed doors to honor their dead family members. Government shut down. Commerce was much reduced. You could not get married or bring petition to the courts. It was a time out of time.
Much like all festivals of the dead, the Romans believed that in this time their deceased were physically present with them and needed sustenance for their 9-day sojourn in the mortal world. A great deal of energy was spent preparing food for the dead and lavishing beautiful decorations on the family sarcophagus. It was a time of solemn feasting.
And yet in the middle of all this, there came the riotous fertility festival of Lupercalia. Ostensibly honoring the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, the ritual activity of Lupercalia had little to do with any aspect of Roman history and a great deal to do with the goat gods.
And as such it was a time of chaos…
parentalia prayer
come to me out of expansive time smooth this troubled brow with ethereal fingers drape your spectral shadow over these fear-hunched shoulders come to me out of worlds beyond world let me taste liminal remembrance sounding ghostly echoes by hearth-light come to me out of winter darkness for i shall be your lighthouse with candles in western windows and cats to chase away the gnawing hunger come to me my own blood and bones be again in this seemingly solid world blaze these broken paths so that i might follow come to me my own soul shepherd with coin to pay the ferryman and boots to bear me over clouds come to me my own dear memory for i am so cold in this world without you
Mercurial Views
Just after sunset, for another week or so, look for Mercury hanging over the southwestern horizon. Dimming from -1.1 early in the month to -0.4 magnitude by the end of next week, it is still easily spotted in the twilight throughout February. And if you have a flat horizon, look directly beneath Mercury this weekend and you will see Venus very low in the sky, beginning its apparition as a bright evening star for much of the remainder of 2026.
©Elizabeth Anker 2026
By My Solitary Hearth 