You found a hidden page
Into the strange half of the manuscript
Most of this site is careful and cold. This corner isn't. The Voynich Manuscript's weirdest folios — nude figures in green pools of impossible plumbing, and a vast fold-out map of nine linked circles — resist even our discipline. Here we let ourselves simply marvel at them, illustrated in our own hand.
The balneological section
Pools, plumbing, and bathers
In one quire the manuscript fills with small nude figures standing in green baths, joined by an elaborate, biologically-impossible network of tubes and reservoirs. No one knows what it depicts. The guesses run from the practical to the esoteric: a treatise on bathing and health (balneotherapy was a real medieval genre), a gynaecological or reproductive text, an alchemical allegory of vessels and distillation, or a cosmological/biological metaphor. The plumbing looks anatomical and architectural at once, and the "water" is often the same green as nothing in nature.
These are our original stylizations, drawn in the manuscript's naïve spirit — deliberately abstract. To see the real folios, browse the Yale digital scans. And for what the statistics actually can and can't say, that's the rest of the site.
The nine rosettes
The fold-out that unfolds into a cosmos
The manuscript's largest page is a six-panel fold-out: nine circular "rosettes" — each a little world of rings, rays, and star-like marks — connected by causeways, with what look like castles and a volcano at the edges. It has been read as a map (of the cosmos, of a real place, of the elements), as a T-O world diagram, and as pure decoration. It is the single most enigmatic object in a very enigmatic book, and one of the few pages whose structure is undeniable even if its meaning is not.
The script
Letters that behave like nothing else
Threaded through all of it is the script itself — looping "gallows" characters, words that repeat like incantations, and (tellingly) almost no corrections, as if written fluently by someone who knew exactly what they were doing, in a system no one else has ever read. Our ornamental frieze below only evokes that hand; it is not, and never claims to be, a real transliteration.