The superstitious can breathe again. This year there is only one Friday the 13th, and it falls in the merry month of May.
Whether the number of black cats that could cross one's path has risen, or how many shooting stars might be sighted is, however, more difficult to predict.
One thing is clear: Those with a penchant for the supernatural will find sufficient reason to study the omens, whether good or bad.
There is probably little wrong with this, as long as superstition does not begin to dominate the subject's life.
In a rational age, superstition and the irrational are in fashion. German pollsters have discovered a wide range of bizarre beliefs, ranging from ghosts and poltergeists to heavenly armies and all sorts of good luck symbols.
Almost a third of the population believes in the existence of angels, while 43 percent would expect good fortune on discovering a four-leafed clover. Seeing a shooting star brings a feeling of good luck to 40 percent.
The numbers have in fact risen in recent years. Thirty years ago, only 26 percent attributed anything special to a four-leafed clover, while just 22 percent reacted to shooting stars.
"When times are hard, people tend to turn to the mystical," says German psychologist Michael Friedrich from Dusseldorf.
Ethnologist Stephan Bachter from the south of the country confirms the phenomenon. "Superstitions respond to the challenges thrown up by life and offer solutions, most of them very simple," he says.
Often it is merely a matter of fun and the attraction of ideas beyond the reach of our science-conditioned everyday lives.
The parade on television of people using Tarot cards and other fortune tellers is evidence of this, as are the ever-popular horoscopes in the local papers.
This is little different from chatting over the weather or other general small-talk and merely a means of passing the time enjoyably, nothing more significant than that.
"Superstition can be a support for some people, and why not?" Friedrich says. He believes people draw strength and consolation from superstition, "all those things that religion and the church used to provide but no longer does."
Bachter is more critical. "Certainly many people are looking to find something spiritual in their lives, but why fill this vacuum with something as trivial as superstition?" he queries.
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