It's Friday the 13th-- Happy Grrrlpower Day!

January 13th, 2012 | 1:53 pm

Are you the kind of person who, when you get in an elevator and notice that the building you're in is trying to pretend there's no 13th floor (by going either from 12 straight to 14, or invoking the ever-reliable "12A"), you roll your eyes and snickers a little? Or are you perhaps relieved that you won't have to pass by Satan's minions on the way to your appointment on the 15th floor? If you're in group B, you probably suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia-- fear of Friday the 13th.

About.com claims that statistics show hospitalization from traffic accidents goes up as much as 50% on Friday the 13th, and that many people simply play hooky on this infamous day to avoid bad luck out there in the devil's playground. Of course, most of us probably don't need a statistics expert to tell us that the causality is almost certainly backwards-- accidents happen more precisely because everyone is freaking out and expecting calamity, not because Satan wills it so. Even so, do you ever wonder, like the fine folks at Christwire, whether Friday the 13th is Just Another Pagan Heathen Holiday, or Actually Part of The Homogay Agenda?

Like any good queer teen, I had my mandatory Wiccan phase in high school; combined with an extremely thorough prep school education that included pre-Christian European history and the transition to monotheism, it's not hard to follow Friday the 13th down a pretty clear path back to some of the early roots of our Patriarchal society's fear and hatred of female power.

First, we've got Friday-- did you know that this day was named for Freyja, the Norse goddess of fertility? As for lucky number 13, there is of course a lot of numerology embedded in every religion's esoteric or mystic traditions; but the one that seems the biggest and most obvious correlation here is the Wiccan cycle of Sabbats & Esbats. That first one looks pretty familiar, right? Like, Sabbath? The Lord's Day? Well, before it was the Lord's Day-- even before my ancestors the Israelites got their hands on it-- these moon-cycle minor festivals were undertaken by slews of goddess-worshippin' pagans, to celebrate seasonal cycles in conjunction with each full and new moon. The Esbats are the halfway points in each month, corresponding neatly with the 13th day. So there you have it-- girlpower day plus girlpower number equals TEH DEVIL.