Counting On Luck: The Superstitious Power of Numbers in Folklore and Humanity

Hi All

OK so I’m going to do something a little different today and send out the first of my folklore inspired essays, this time, on numbers and their powers in superstition.

Hope you enjoy!

Alex

PS. thanks to all who have read my new folk-horror short story collection Epiphany and More. Out now on Amazon as paperback and eBook.

Signed copies still available on my website, www.darkfellwrites.com. Enter EPIPHANY10 at checkout for 10% off!

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge cricket fan. I’m a member at Hampshire CCC and I spend many days each summer in Southampton watching them play. I even used to play (badly) when I was younger, both for my school and later my university, and then for a local team before giving up my Sunday’s became too much after having a family. It’s (sadly) the end of the English domestic season now but in the final week, I attended day 2 of Hampshire’s final match of the season against Surrey. It was a big game, which Hampshire needed simply to avoid defeat in order not to be relegated from the top division of the English County Championship (spoiler: they did lose, but by sheer luck, the other relegation contenders lost worse, and Hampshire survived the drop!). I was sitting in the stands with a couple of thousand other fans with the game in the balance and Surrey batting, the score reached 111 when a fan in front of me suddenly got up out of his seat, hopped on one foot and then sat back down as if nothing had happened.

Now, for those of you who don’t follow cricket, I imagine this would sound like a very odd thing to do, which of course, it was, but for the rest of us, this was actually, not that surprising. A total of 111 runs is nicknamed “Nelson” in cricket terms, with 222 a “double Nelson,” 333 a “triple Nelson,” and so forth. The origin of this superstition is rooted in a popular myth about Admiral Horatio Nelson having “One Eye, One Arm, One Leg.” Although factually inaccurate, (Nelson only lost an eye and an arm, not a leg), this legend became a piece of cricketing folklore associated with bad luck.

Umpire David Shepherd, an umpire from Devon, famously used to react to a Nelson by hopping on one leg whenever 111 (or any other multiple of Nelson) appeared on the scoreboard. Crowds used to love this moment, and I have fond memories of watching the test matches in the summer and seeing his famous hop.

There was even a remarkable moment in cricket history when on 11th November 2011 (11/11/11) at 11.11am, South Africa needed 111 runs to win a test match against Australia. Many of the crowd as well as umpire Ian Gould stood on one leg until that minute was passed (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/jun/03/the-spin-hedley-verity-superstition-luck-cricket).

There are other numbers around the cricketing world which signal bad luck. In Australia, for example, the number 87 is considered unlucky for a batsman, known as the “Devil’s Number.” Why? Because it’s 13 runs short of a century. The lore behind this is somewhat uncertain but it can be traced back to ex-Australian test cricketer Keith Miller watching his childhood hero Don Bradman being dismissed in an Australian domestic game for 87. And even though Keith Miller was mistaken (Bradman was actually out for 89, the scoreboard just hadn’t quite ticked over yet), the story gained traction in Australian media (https://www.cricket.com.au/news/3258317). There’s no statistical evidence that batters are more likely to be dismissed for 87 (or 187, 287 etc.) In fact, statistician Ric Finlay showed that Australian batters were actually more likely to be out for 85 than 87.

However, this doesn’t change the fact that superstition and especially superstition around numbers hold a lot power over individuals and whole societies. The number thirteen is the obvious example of this. Many high-rise buildings don’t have a 13th floor, ships don’t have a deck 13. There are even estimates that the US economy loses hundreds of millions of dollars every Friday the 13th as people avoid travelling and defer big purchases on that day.

Like many traditions, it’s very difficult to pinpoint exactly where this superstition originates and like most folklore, it probably has various origins which build on each other over time. For example, in Christianity, Judas Iscariot is the thirteenth guest at the table during the Last Supper leading to the betrayal of Jesus. The Norse mythology equivalent is the trickster Loki crashing a banquet of twelve gods, becoming the thirteenth guest, ultimately leading to the death of the beloved god Baldr, and I’m sure there are lots of similar stories from around the world where thirteen spells disaster. But if 13 is considered the unluckiest number in Western superstition, 7 is probably its opposite, hailed as lucky or even mystical. The number seven has appeared as lucky or meaningful throughout the centuries in many different cultures around the world. There are seven days in a week, Seven Wonders of the world, and in the Bible, God created the world in seven days, all reinforcing the idea of seven as a number of completeness or perfection. The number seven appears everywhere, medieval scholars spoke of the seven virtues and seven deadly sins, heaven itself was imagined as layered into seven heavens. Another traditional occurrence of the number seven in folklore is the idea of the “seventh son of a seventh son” being blessed with some kind of power. To be the seventh male child in line, born to a father who is himself a seventh son, was believed in British and Irish tradition to possess special healing or second sight from birth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_son_of_a_seventh_son). This was taken very seriously in the past. For example, in 18th century Lancashire, a seventh son of a seventh son was often called “Doctor” by default, reflecting the expectation that he could cure ailments by mystical means.

So again, where does all this come from? Why do we consider some numbers lucky or unlucky? Part of our fascination with numbers endures because superstition itself behaves like cultural memory. Before we had scientific models to explain probability, people relied on observation and pattern recognition to navigate an unpredictable world. When misfortune struck twice on the same date, or a harvest failed after thirteen days of rain, the connection felt meaningful, and so the story was told again and again until it became truth by repetition. What began as coincidence hardened into tradition.

Studies in cognitive science show that the human brain is a pattern-seeking and pattern-confirming system. We are hard-wired to detect order in chaos, an evolutionary advantage that once helped our ancestors survive. Spotting a pattern in animal tracks or seasonal cycles could mean the difference between life and death. When our brains identify a pattern that seems to predict outcomes, even by chance, we remember it and pass it on and over generations and these perceived connections solidify into cultural wisdom.

There’s also evidence from social learning theory that superstition spreads and persists through imitation and reinforcement. Children often adopt the beliefs of their parents or peers without direct instruction, especially when those beliefs appear to avert harm. Psychologist B. F. Skinner’s 1948 experiment with pigeons demonstrated that even animals can develop “superstitious” behaviours if they associate a random action with a reward. Humans are no different: if we avoid the number 13 and then nothing bad happens, the absence of misfortune itself becomes proof that the avoidance worked, a feedback loop that strengthens belief. Over time, these learned associations become folk memory, carried forward even when the original context has long been forgotten.

Anthropologists suggest that this transmission of numerical folklore also provides social cohesion. Shared beliefs, even irrational ones, help communities feel connected, offering a sense of collective control over the uncontrollable. In uncertain times, adhering to folkloric superstition isn’t just about luck, it’s about belonging. The act of believing together is itself reassuring. From this perspective, number superstitions aren’t primitive relics of ignorance, but adaptive cultural tools, ways of turning randomness into a story. It’s our storytelling brains trying to make sense of a random, often unknowable world.

We can dig a little deeper into our pattern recognising brains here. Human beings are intrinsically very good at spotting patterns in nature. For example, we can instantly recognize the difference between background noise and a human made sound; we hear and appreciate known rhythms in music. Notes that are out of key just sound wrong and there’s an explainable mathematical basis for this. When two notes sound harmonious, it’s because the ratio of their sound frequencies forms a simple relationship. A perfect octave, for instance, has a frequency ratio of 2:1; a perfect fifth, 3:2; and a perfect fourth, 4:3. These numerical ratios produce vibrations that fit together in a pleasing pattern, the sound waves aligning in regular intervals. When the ratio becomes more complicated such as, 45:32 or 81:64, the result is what we hear as discord, because the waves don’t align cleanly. What we perceive as beauty in sound can be seen as order expressed through number. This understanding was known to the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras believed that “all things are number.” In fact, he and his followers noticed that the same ratios governing musical harmony appeared elsewhere in the natural world in geometry, in astronomy, and in the proportions of living things.

They even identified this proportion as the golden ratio, often denoted by the Greek letter φ (phi). Roughly equal to 1.618, the golden ratio has fascinated mathematicians, artists, and philosophers for centuries. It appears when a line is divided so that the whole length is to the longer part as the longer part is to the shorter. The golden ratio is found in the spirals of shells, the branching of trees, the unfurling of ferns, even in the proportions of the human body. Many of nature’s most visually pleasing forms, from sunflower heads to galaxies, follow this same underlying pattern with the golden ratio at its hear. It also underpins the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The further the sequence progresses, the closer the ratio between numbers approaches φ.

This led mathematicians and scholars to often call the golden ratio, the divine ratio. If this number appears everywhere in nature, surely it was a sign of the building blocks of God.

Perhaps this is why superstitions and folklore around numbers endure, through a mix of our pattern seeking brains and need for cultural cohesion, humans have an intuition that numbers shape reality. They are the language we use to measure, we use them to compose music, predict tides, track the movements of the moon, the sun and the stars. Numbers offer us the comforting illusion that chance can be reasoned with, to believe that the universe, somehow, adds up. But in all of this, they also give us something very human. They give us story, and that’s something that has endured and will continue to endure, throughout our history.