[Author’s note: Page numbers are referenced as they appear in the actual manuscript as per The Voynich Manuscript,Yale Books, not this PDF. Link to PDF of the Voynich Manuscript, holybooks.com. Feel free to peruse before reading.]
Prick of nettle, thorn of rose, stalk of henbane, loosely tied with bindweed tendrils, this wild and deadly bouquet expresses the soul and sting of the nemophilist wanderer, whose forager sisters meet beneath the walnut tree. Head in the stars, hands in the hedgerows, toes rooted in the soil, our boundaries are marked with armfuls of plant magic gathered along moonlit tracks where wild flowers grow. We are keepers of a kaleidoscope of plant wisdom remembered, not written down.
Meadowsweet, oregano, poppy, rue, liquorice, mandrake: a stream of plant consciousness flows from the mystical botanical, astrological and figurative illustrations in the veiled codex that is the Voynich Manuscript. Intuition says women created it. Will I still love it if the creators turn out to be male?
Dated from 1404, bound in vellum, this portfolio of plant possibilities, journeying through the creator’s wild imagination, continues to baffle. I’m not a translator, botanist or astrologer, I’m searching for the Divine Female within symbolism, so I’m not decoding the undeciphered script. I’m stepping through the Voynich portal, hoping the images can teach me about the transcendent relationship between women and plants.
There are botanical sketches; astrological charts; medicine wheels; star maps; cartoonish drawings of nymphs and women (few of men); pharmaceutical leaf and root recipes with ‘where to cut’ diagrams and some kind of spell list or index.
Henbane, dittany, belladonna, poison hemlock, colchicum, aconite: trawling through lists of curative plants, I learn medicinal uses vary. Many double as emmenagogues, abortifacients, galactagogues, contraceptives and anodynes. Meticulous knowledge is essential – some are deadly. Women’s wisdom was rooted in plant magic since body autonomy, nutrition, ceremony and psycho-spiritual expression depended upon it.
Flower in the cosmos, leaves on the Earth plane, roots in the underworld, these plant sketches resemble the World Tree. Stylised and truncated to fit on the page, perhaps these, mostly unrecognisable botanicals, are drawn from observation, imagination, descriptions, ancestral memory, mythology, even floral motifs travelling the Silk Route.
“Sometimes, while painting, something wild gets unleashed. Something of the process of dreams recurs.” – Adnan, Etel. Popova, Maria. Art and the Nocturnal Imagination: Painter, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on Dreaming and Creativity, The Marginalian.
Minoan art shows women with ‘levitating’ lilies and crocus. In ancient Egypt women were drawn in harmony with the hallucinogenic blue lotus. Female shamans were buried with cannabis. The witches of Thessaly were astronomers and herbalists. So how did women’s transcendent relationship with plants spiral to persecution?
“Sola dosis facit venenum.” – Paracelsus (born 1493), The dose makes the poison, Wikipedia.
In Euripides’ play, Medea, 431 BCE, Medea invoked Hecate then rampaged with poison, a metaphor for ‘wisdom in the minds of women’ being poison that destroys the system of male privilege that is patriarchy. Did the Voynich aim to preserve millennia of women’s sacred herbal knowledge, anticipating a fall from ‘divine to demonic’? Untranslated it’s hard to say, although during the Renaissance, a turbo-charged era of learning, men competed with women’s medicinal wisdom. Patriarchal propaganda claimed female healers were witches and fraudsters. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared ‘witches’ as heretics.
“It takes one generation for local traditional plant knowledge to get forgotten.” – Harkford, Robin. Edible and Medicinal Wild Plants of Britain and Ireland.
Borage, wild carrot, wormwood, Angelica: the script is encoded, so maybe the images are too. So far there is only one plant I can identify with confidence – chicory. An astrological chart (p57) shows Polaris, around which words and nymph-women spin, assuming the four rotational positions of Ursa Major, forming the Swastika, a logo corrupted by patriarchal regimes. Similar images of women in celestial spin decorate a Samarra platter, 5000 BCE.
“We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.” – Anaïs Nin. Goodreads.
In this image, a square, formed of eight circles, circumscribes Polaris. It’s corners may represent the four rotational positions of ‘Corner Star’ Alkaid, part of the Ursa Major constellation. As the SE Corner Star detaches from the star grid a mystical, nymph-deity raises her arm to catch it and harness it’s energy.
“I would not think to touch the sky with two arms” – Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Goodreads.
In medieval astronomy Alkaid, source of apotropaic magic, was associated with Venus, the Moon, magnetite and chicory, the ‘clock flower’ [Magnetite is found in Magnesia in Thessaly and on the moon. ‘Virus lunare’ is a potent elixir created by the witches of Thessaly (using crystals?) harnessing moon ‘liquid’ to activate herbs]. The pull out, double page diagram (following p85), a larger version of the eight-circle-square, must be a star map. Stars, decorated with anthers, filaments and petals, are drawn as ‘flower worlds’ with tubular plant stems and conical hoods acting as energy conduits, pumping out star magic. Twin pathways joining the stars resemble the Pictish double-disc symbol.
Do these visuals hold clues to meaning? These are my thoughts: chicory centre’s many Voynich astrological, medicine wheels. Petal-like wavy lines, represent Alkaid magic. Chicory blue represents sky magic, petal power and phlegmatic symptoms. Green represents magical plant brews – think Absinthe. Tubular plant stems syphon astro-plant magic. Roots in the underworld may tap spirit wisdom. Amulets protect. The recurring, six-pointed star is Venus, possibly representing dawn, dusk, dosage, hexes, spells, or the apotropaic power of the Goddess. Link to medieval manuscript, showing planet Venus and a woman with a six pointed star over her yoni. Lunar crescents may represent cycles, dates, deities or phlegmatic symptoms.
Fennel, chicory, fenugreek, yarrow, nettle: perhaps flowers are colour coded according to the humours – yellow bile (think dandelion), black bile (roots?), blood (red) and phlegm (blue). The four humours, central to medieval medicine, incorporated the seasons and planets, for example Sanguine symptoms were associated with blood, red, spring and Jupiter. The chart alternating chicory blue petals with red (p67) may relate to Sanguine conditions.
Pennyroyal, witch hazel, horse chestnut, myrtle, agrimony: the manuscript could be a workbook for purging, douching, spell craft, apotropaic magic, love potions (men feature mainly when linked to women in astrological charts), aphrodisiacs, fertility enhancers, entheogens (psychedelics for spiritual practices), poisons, unguents, tinctures, with a cornucopia of herbs to support female body autonomy, all working in conjunction with the seasons, planetary alignments, moon phases, nocturnal realms gated by Venus and the supranatural times of noon and midnight. Putting apotropaic wisdom at the centre of astrological medicine wheels acknowledges we are part of a vast and wise universe.
Women are creatures connected to cosmic cycles and flowers are seasonal. Sowing stars; sowing seeds; flowers opening; stars appearing; growing season; seasoned women – it’s a bewitching universe and a tragedy to replace the starry Goddess: Nut, Astraea, Selene, Venus, Artemis, Diana, Hecate, with one hierarchal sky god.
The divisive patriarchal world order demonises ‘errant’ women, plants and animals, as witches, weeds and vermin. Meanwhile synthetic chemicals overflow in our waterways. May we all become ecofeminists re-wilding our future.
“Most ecofeminists reject [ ] hierarchies as alien to the natural world – nature is interconnections.” – Kemmerer Lisa, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice. Goodreads.
Before talking ‘women in conversation whilst bathing in plant brews’, I’m talking hierarchy and ownership. Owning the skills and wisdom of others ‘is’ capitalist patriarchy. Maybe the mandrake screams because matrifocal wisdom was meant to be gifted. Named after a man who bought the manuscript, a lineage of male owners has been traced. Owning books, owning land, Mother Nature doesn’t work this way. Wild and free, She will reclaim your borders with thistles and oak trees.
The forest, as world lung, asks we slow down and bathe in her poetry.
(To be continued)
References
Clements Raymond, Editor. Harkness Deborah, Introduction. The Voynich Manuscript, 2016, Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library in Association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, yalebooks.com
wp-content, uploads, Voynich-Manuscript.pdf. Holy Books. holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Voynich-Manuscript.pdf
Popova, Maria. Art and the Nocturnal Imagination: Painter, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on Dreaming and Creativity
18 Mar. 2019. The Marginalian. themarginalian.org/2019/03/18/etel-adnan-journey-to-mount-tamalpais-dreaming/?fbclid=IwAR1CWxn1P9Qn7IAeuH5c-0vEJ_956DzM1go8ms6FENUfHzEZXuARHF5U96g
Anais Nin, Quotes, Quotable Quote, Goodreads. goodreads.com/quotes/488173-our-culture-made-a-virtue-of-living-only-as-extroverts
Paracelsus, The dose makes the poison, Wikipedia. wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
Kemmerer Lisa, Sister Species Quotes: Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice by Lisa Kemmerer. Goodreads. goodreads.com/work/quotes/14774915-sister-species-women-animals-and-social-justice
If Not, Winter Quotes, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Goodreads. goodreads.com/work/quotes/145021-if-not-winter-fragments-of-sappho
Harkford Robin. Edible and Medicinal Wild Plants of Britain and Ireland.
eatweeds.co.uk/collections/paperbacks
Cod. Pal. germ. 291 ‘Iatromathematisches Hausbuch’ ; Gebete und Betrachtungen u. a. Bayern, nach 1477/vor 1496 Page: 24v. Nenaro kova, Anna. Pinterest. pinterest.co.uk/pin/724657396294575268/
Wow! That is all. <3