Numbers
29
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Origin 1908 to 1965
Twenty-nine is prime and forms a twin pair with 31. Its significance is lunar and practical: the synodic month, new moon to new moon, averages 29.53 days, so lunar calendars alternate months of twenty-nine and thirty days to stay in step. The Hebrew and Islamic calendars both work this way, and in traditional Islamic practice the decision to close a month at twenty-nine days rests on the sighting of the new crescent. In digit-reduction numerology its digits sum first to 11, treated in that system as a master number, before resolving to 2.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1908 to 1965 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin Period500 BCE to 300 CE 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Origin PeriodThe arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2 Origin PeriodThe system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1 Place of OriginThe Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Place of OriginThe United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Attributed Author / CompilerAttributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore Attributed Author / CompilerMrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Origin of the NamePythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors) Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 3 + 0 = 3. Whatever the system says of 30 it therefore says of 3, which its own description already states directly ("In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 3"), because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own accountIn number theory twenty nine is the tenth prime, and it is a Sophie Germain prime, since twice twenty nine plus one is fifty nine, itself prime. It forms a twin prime pair with thirty one, the two differing by two. It carries no religious or scriptural significance recorded in any tradition this atlas has surveyed. 3 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNumerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1 Learn More
The Lunar Month
Twenty-nine is prime, and its chief significance is astronomical: the synodic month, from one new moon to the next, is about twenty-nine and a half days, so lunar calendars alternate months of twenty-nine and thirty days to keep pace. In the Islamic calendar a month is twenty-nine or thirty days depending on the sighting of the new crescent, and Ramadan may be either length; the Hebrew calendar likewise sets its months at twenty-nine or thirty. The half-day surplus is the reason no whole number of days fits the moon, and twenty-nine is the shorter of the two values the calendars must juggle. As a number in its own right twenty-nine reduces to eleven and then to two, so some schemes treat it as carrying the intuitive charge of the master number eleven.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers reads twenty-nine as a compound of uncertainty, treachery and deception from others, unreliable friends and grief brought by the opposite sex, one of the more sharply negative readings in his scheme; Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved it, and the reading has no connection to the lunar arithmetic already described above, Cheiro having built his compound meanings from name-numerology practice rather than from any astronomical source.
Twenty-Nine as a Threshold
In astrology the planet Saturn completes its circuit of the zodiac in about twenty-nine and a half years, so the so-called Saturn return, when the planet regains its natal position around the age of twenty-nine or thirty, is treated as a passage into adulthood and reckoning, a modern astrological commonplace built on a genuine orbital period. Beyond the lunar and Saturnine cycles, twenty-nine carries little traditional lore; it is one of the primes that the older number symbolism largely passed over, and what significance it holds is borrowed from its nearness to the month and to the round thirty. Its honest description is a number of the moon's incomplete fit to the count of days.
Outside any numerological system, twenty-nine has its own documented folk custom: in Ireland, tradition holds that women may propose marriage to men on the twenty-ninth of February, a leap-year custom sometimes called Bachelor's Day and traced in popular retelling to a legend of Saint Brigid bargaining with Saint Patrick, though the earliest verifiable references to the custom in print date only to the nineteenth century, presenting as an old folk tradition a practice that cannot be documented earlier than that.
Correspondences & Relations
Numerology Meanings
Born on the twenty-ninth, the compound reduces first to eleven, so schools that watch for masters treat this day as an eleven before it becomes a two. The gift is intuition arriving through difficulty rather than ease; the older tables read twenty-nine as a testing number. Whether it is reported as eleven or two depends entirely on the reader's reduction rule.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997on the pedigree claimed for modern numerologyView the Source 2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962the chapters on Pythagoras and on Pythagorean number theoryView the Source 3. 29 (number) (Wikipedia)
The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), Brill, 2005s.v. calendar; the lunar monthView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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