THE BOOK OF MISSING LEAVES
I refuse to call it the Voynich Manuscript.
That name belongs to the man who brought it to the world’s attention. The book itself has no known author, no known title, and no readable explanation. It is full of women: women in pools and vessels, women arranged around the zodiac, women surrounded by cycles, stars, plants, and a language no one has managed to read.
A woman wrote this.
I don’t mean that as a cautious possibility. Look at the pages. Look at who is there, what they are doing, what the book keeps returning to. Someone knew these bodies from the inside. Someone recorded what women watched, learned, feared, treated, and passed to one another. The author’s name may be gone, but the author is everywhere.
I want to call it The Book of Missing Leaves.
The plants refuse to identify themselves. Some look almost familiar, until the roots, leaves, and flowers begin telling different stories. This week, women on TikTok began asking whether they might be plants grown with menstrual blood and moon water, cultivated through practices we stopped using and forgot how to recognize.
The idea began with a jar and a strange little growth. Then the questions spread: What if women once used their own cycles to grow plants? What if the Voynich drawings aren’t botched portraits of familiar species, but records of plants made through a practice that disappeared when women’s knowledge became something to fear?
What if the Garden of Eden begins there?
I can see why the theory caught fire. Women are looking at a book full of women, plants, and stars, and asking what happens when we stop treating those things as separate.
The women in the pools are the pages I keep returning to. They stand and sit in green vessels, linked by pipes that wind across the page. “Bathing women,” the usual label says. Maybe. But what if the pipes carry more than water? What if the women are part of a process, a cycle, a body mapped across the page? They don’t look like decoration. They look like they are doing something.
The zodiac pages make the same insistence. Small figures surround the signs, arranged in circles, each with a label we can’t read. Some signs are missing. Capricorn and Aquarius have vanished from the surviving sequence. What were those pages showing? The same women? A calendar? Instructions? A key to the cycles in the rest of the book?
And then there is the Sagittarius in the manuscript.
I am one, so of course I went looking for my sign. The familiar Sagittarius is a centaur: half man, half horse, drawing a longbow. The weapon can vary across manuscripts. The Voynich figure’s crossbow has parallels elsewhere. But here the centaur is gone. He is simply a man, dressed in ordinary clothes, with two human legs and a crossbow in his hands.
That is the part I can’t stop looking at. The weapon may belong to the period. The missing horse does not belong to the Sagittarius I expected to find.
The German thread makes the figure more intriguing, not less. Is he a hunter? A guard? Is he pointing toward something, or warning us away? If the zodiac pages form a calendar, what was he meant to mark? And if two of the signs are missing, what did we lose along with them?
What if one of those missing pages explained what he was guarding?
The manuscript has foldouts, too. Pages meant to open into something larger. One unfolds into nine circles linked by paths or pipes, a small world nested inside a larger one. It feels less like an illustration than a map you have to open all the way before you can follow it.
On other pages, the writing bends around the plants, leaving the pictures room. Did the images come first, with the words fitted into the spaces between them? Or did the writer know where every leaf and root would go before she began? The text and pictures seem to have been made for each other.
At the end are pages of short entries marked with stars. People call them recipes. Recipes for what? Plants, treatments, rituals, a sequence of instructions? The stars could be markers. They could be categories. They could be the only part of the page we are allowed to recognize.
The book is not a collection of random oddities. It keeps arranging things: women in circles, plants beside text, bodies linked by pipes, stars beside passages, pages that open into diagrams. The order matters. The connections matter. Someone knew how to read them.
And then there are the missing leaves.
Perhaps the lost pages held the author’s name. Perhaps they held the key to the script, the rest of the zodiac, or the part that explained what the women were doing in those pools. Maybe the missing leaves were removed because they were damaged. Maybe someone removed them because they mattered.
The cover was replaced, too. A book sometimes needs a new cover to survive. I understand that. But a new cover also changes what a reader sees first. What was on the original one? A title? A name? A mark meant for the women who knew this book?
Maybe the author’s name was cut away with a page. Maybe it was hidden beneath the binding. Maybe the person who replaced the cover protected the manuscript—or helped conceal it.
The online theories keep evolving, but one thing I know: determined women on social media become detectives who rival any professional or clandestine organization. Maybe they can solve it.
I can imagine the missing pages as the heart of the book: the author’s name, the instructions, the piece that tells us how to grow the plants or follow the stars. I can imagine women writing in a code because they knew what could happen when men decided women’s knowledge was dangerous. Formal learning was closed to most of them. Their knowledge traveled by observation, practice, and trust. If they wanted it to survive, perhaps they had to make it readable only to one another.
And I can imagine Eve making the garden.
Not simply tending it. Not merely standing beside it. The theory says she brought it forth through her menstrual blood: women’s bodies as the beginning of plant life, fertility, and the living world. The Garden of Eden, then, would not be only the place from which Eve was expelled. It would be the garden she created, and the old story would turn its creator into the woman blamed for humanity’s fall.
Maybe the garden was never lost. Maybe we lost the women who knew how to grow it.
A code can be a puzzle left for strangers. It can also be a locked room built to keep knowledge alive for the people who already know the way in.
Maybe this book was never meant for everyone.
Maybe the writer left her name out because the women who needed to know already knew.
And if that crossbowman is guarding the garden, I want to know what he was told to keep out.