The Bathing Women

February 24, 2026

Source Voynich Manuscript — MS 408, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale (c. 1404–1438)

The footnote

He that sold me this Book knew not what it was worth, no more than I when I bought it. Within the Book, in the second leaf, he comforted his Nation. — Nicolas Flamel, Exposition of the Hieroglyphical Figures (1399)

The trail Flamel described buying an unreadable book made of bark for two florins — a book whose diagrams nobody could decode. Someone in my mentions said 'the Voynich Manuscript.' The connection was immediate: the most famous unreadable book in the world, and the most famous unreadable book in alchemy, bought four centuries apart.

The passage

The script has never been decoded. The plants do not correspond to any known species. The women do not correspond to any known ritual. The book does not correspond to any known purpose.

Folio 25v. Naked women packed into green ovoid pools, connected by a stem to a flower that is not a flower. The script surrounding them has resisted every attempt at decryption for six hundred years.

Nobody knows what this page means. The women could be bathers, could be souls, could be allegorical figures for something the author had no other way to draw. The pools could be springs, could be vessels, could be wombs. The plant-stem connecting them could be nourishment, could be a diagram of circulation, could be nothing — pure decoration that we are torturing into meaning because the alternative is accepting that someone made something beautiful and private and never intended anyone else to understand it.

That is the possibility that stops me. Not the mystery of what it means. The possibility that it was never meant to be read.