The Voynich Manuscript, the Moon, and Your Body
Happy new moon in Libra! It went exact this morning, and since Libra is all about balance, it feels like the right sky for a post about our bodies falling back into rhythm with the moon.
A rabbit hole with roots
Confession: I meant to spend ten minutes looking something up this week and surfaced two hours later, tea gone cold, deep in a 600 year old book that nobody on Earth can read. (Productivity? Never heard of her.)
Sextile Oracle Card IX, Releasing Rumination (which I clearly did not do)
The book is the Voynich Manuscript, and lately it has been making the rounds again with a very particular claim attached... that it holds secret women's knowledge about the moon, plants, and our monthly cycles. As someone who spends most of her days drawing roots, petals, and moon phases, I was obviously not going to scroll past that one.
The most mysterious book in the world
The Voynich Manuscript is a hand written, hand painted codex on vellum that has been carbon dated to the early 1400s. It is named for Wilfrid Voynich, the book dealer who bought it in 1912, and it now lives at Yale's Beinecke Library, where you can page through the whole thing online for free (dangerous information, I know).
A botanical page from the Voynich Manuscript. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (public domain).
Its text is written in a script no one has ever deciphered. Its pages are full of plants that don't quite match any real species, star charts and zodiac wheels, and, famously, little groups of naked women lounging in pools of green and blue liquid connected by strange tubes. Codebreakers who cracked wartime ciphers have tried it. Linguists have tried it. Dozens of people have announced they've "solved" it. It keeps its secrets anyway.
The theory going around
The newest wave started on TikTok, where a moon water trend (yes, the kind with a little extra something from your own body added in) collided with Voynich lore. People began comparing those strange painted plants to the manuscript's botanical pages, and the idea grew from there: that medieval women were recording a hidden system linking menstruation, lunar timing, and plant medicine, and wrote it in code to keep it safe.
One of the famous bathing pages. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (public domain).
It isn't a brand new idea, either. Back in 2017 a researcher argued in the Times Literary Supplement that the manuscript was a women's health manual, pointing to similarities with the Trotula, a famous medieval collection of texts on women's medicine. Experts weren't convinced, and to be completely honest with you... nobody has produced a translation that holds up. The Voynich is still unsolved.
But I don't think that makes the theory useless. It tells us something about what we're hungry for.
Meanwhile, in an actual lab
Here's the part that gave me goosebumps. Last fall, a chronobiologist at the University of Würzburg named Charlotte Helfrich-Förster published a study in Science Advances looking at decades of women's personal period records. Cycles recorded before 2010 were significantly synchronized with the full and new moon. After 2010 (hello, LED bulbs and smartphones), that sync mostly vanished, showing up only in January, when the moon's gravitational pull is strongest.
Her team thinks artificial light at night drowns out the moon's quiet signal and may even shorten our cycles. She's careful to call it a correlation, not proof. Still... the idea that our bodies might have once kept time with the moon, and that we've simply turned the lights up too bright to hear it, feels less like science fiction and more like something our great grandmothers could have told us.
The Moon, from the Dark Days Tarot
Why it hits so hard right now
So much knowledge kept by women, healers, and hedge folk was never written down at all, or was written down and then lost, burned, or dismissed as superstition. A book full of herbs, moons, and bodies that literally cannot be read is the perfect mirror for that ache. We look at it and see what was taken.
And we're heading into the dark half of the year, when Samhain thins the veil and everything turns inward. It's the season for remembering what's been forgotten, ancestral, bodily, or otherwise. (Whether or not you bleed, by the way, you still live by cycles. The moon doesn't check your paperwork.)
Try this: the Unread Page
You don't need to crack a medieval cipher to reclaim a little lunar rhythm. Tonight's new moon in Libra is the perfect excuse (or the next full or new moon, if you're reading this later): try a screens off evening. Dim the house, let the dark in, and sit with your cards.
Eight of Wands, from the Mother Tarot
The Unread Page spread (five cards)
The Root: What old knowledge lives in my body?
The Script: What message have I been unable to read?
The Bloom: What is ready to grow if I tend it?
The Glare: What bright noise is drowning out my own rhythm?
The Moon: How can I keep better time with myself this season?
Afterward, journal one line for each card, then put the pen down and let it be unfinished. Some pages are meant to stay a little mysterious.
Until the next moon
As I write this, the moon is new in Libra, the sign of balance, beauty, and finding the middle ground between two worlds (heaven and earth, cipher and meaning, body and calendar... you see where I'm going). It feels like a fitting moon for setting intentions about rhythm. Mine is simple: I'm back at my drawing table building out the Sextile Oracle page, a home for every new card as it comes to life. More on that very soon.
This is close to my heart for a reason. Dark Days Tarot was inspired by the dark days of the lunar cycle, the days long linked in folklore with bleeding time, before modern life knocked so many of us out of rhythm. It's a deck for looking into your shadows for answers that feed your deeper needs, which feels like exactly the work of these long, inward nights.
And speaking of new beginnings... I'm back at the drawing table building the Sextile Oracle, one card at a time. You can follow along with each new card here.
If something in this post is calling to you, use code MOONMAIL for 10% off in the shop.
If you want to go deeper on the body as a source of wisdom, Christiane Northrup's Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom is a classic I keep coming back to. And I'd love to hear what came up in your spread... hit reply on my next Moonbeams letter and tell me.
xx Wren
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