The second section, the astrological, is the most detailed of the manuscript’s sections, and it suggests a total cosmological system. A creature, a mix between a dragon and a sea horse, suckles on a speckled leaf. Colorless flowers perch on leaves with spikes like Venus flytraps. Hairy bulbs sprout rust-red tubers and yellow pods. There’s something unsettling about the drawings it’s almost like a catalogue of extinct species. The long herbal section, our first indication that something is off, comprises colorful drawings of what look like uprooted plants alongside paragraphs of text.
And the illustrations don’t illuminate the mystery they only throw further shadows on the darkness. The symbols arranged in prosaic lines look like language, though the significance of the “Voynichese,” as it’s called, has never been established. It’s traditionally divided into four sections-herbal, astrological, balneological (pertaining to baths), and pharmacological-not for what those sections are but for what analysts, grasping for understanding, think they resemble. The Voynich Manuscript isn’t a beautiful book in fact, it’s crude and cheaply done. But no matter how hard people search for answers, the book refuses to yield meaning-it’s totally incomprehensible.
More cynical thinkers believe that the manuscript is a hoax, probably created by medieval charlatans. Some have suggested it was written by the philosopher Roger Bacon, while others insist it must have been bestowed on humanity by aliens. Scholars have tried to decode it for centuries. It’s as outside of genre as dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary, and indeed it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was composed by someone descending into madness. And while the illustrations appear to be plants or stars or baths, in fact they have no analogue in the known world. It isn’t written in a foreign language rather, this language is totally unknown.
Yet as soon as you try reading the book, it resists. The Voynich Manuscript, an early fifteenth-century volume housed in Yale’s Beinecke library, looks at first like any such edition, with its loopy text and colorful illustrations. Even editions made from common calfskin can inspire the same awe as the upper reaches of cathedrals. Medieval manuscripts are survivors-of Viking raids, of damp and decay-but even with delicate, fragile pages and binding, many of them remain luminous, their vellum illuminated in gold and silver, embellished with vegetal and animistic imagery, and sketched through with the marginalia of generations of owners.
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