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.