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.