The Conspiracy Superstition
One of the theories as to where the superstition of Friday the 13th being an unlucky day came from goes back to Friday, October 13, 1307.
But actually, the story started before that…
King Philip IV of France had constant financial issues. In an attempt to resolve them, he stole property and devalued his currency. As a last resort, he attempted to tax the church. As you might have guessed, this caused problems with Rome and Pope Boniface VIII.
As a result, the pope issued a dictum forbidding the taxation of the clergy. In response, Phillip cut off Rome’s trans-alpine money supply by closing the French borders to the exportation of gold bullion and he had the bishop of Pamiers arrested and charged with blasphemy, sorcery, and fornication.
In retaliation the pope issued a bull condemning the arrest and revoked some of the Beautiful’s papal privileges. The Beautiful burned his copy of the bull in public. The pope delivered a stinging sermon filled with ominous warnings that the church was a creature with one head, not a monster with two. The Beautiful issued charges, in absentia, against the pope himself, alleging blasphemy, sorcery, and sodomy.
Well, you can imagine that this infuriated the Pope and he in turn excomunicated Phillip; there was even a rumor circulating that the Pope might just excomunicate all of France thanks to Phillip’s actions. Hearing whispers of a revolution, Phillip sent an army to Anagni, where the Pope Boniface was staying and placed the 86 year old religious icon under house arrest. Boniface was rescued by locals but passed away anyway a month later.
Then in 1305, after Phillip’s wife died, he applied for membership in the Knights Templar. Yet, he, the king of France, was blackballed by the Paris Templars.
Still in a financial crisis a year later, Phillip tripled the price of everything in France overnight. (This occurred coincidently around the time that Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, returned to Europe from the Mediterranean accompanied by sixty knights and quite a bit of wealth. ) The result of the new pricing was rebellion and riots. Philip’s life was at stake and he actually fled to the Paris Templars and begged for protection.
In the fall of 1307, Philip arranged a state action impressive even in these days of data highways and rapid deployment teams. On September 14 he mass-mailed a set of sealed orders to every bailiff, seneschal, deputy and officer in his kingdom. The functionaries were forbidden under penalty of death to open the papers before Thursday night, October 12th. The following Friday morning, alert to their secret instructions, armies of officials slipped out of their barracks. By sundown on Friday, October 13th, nearly all the Knights Templar throughout France were in jails. One estimate puts the arrests at two thousand, another as high as five thousand. Only twenty escaped.
The initial charges were vague - “A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to think of and terrible to hear, a detestable crime, an execrable evil, an abominable act, a repulsive disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed alien to all humanity, has, thanks to the reports of several trustworthy persons, reached our ear, smiting us grievously and causing us to tremble with the utmost horror.” The Templars were subsequently tortured until they “confessed” and were executed.
From that day on, Friday the 13th was considered by followers of the Templars as an evil and unlucky day.
Or so the story goes…
tags: Conspiracy Theories, Templars
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on October 14, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Jenny Ryan said:
Very interesting. Never knew any of that.