Oct 5, 2026 · 37 min · 10 segments
A 600-year-old book that nobody can read, full of women bathing in strange pools, plants that don't exist and circles of stars. In this episode we go beyond the codebreakers and into the theories…
All right, so [clears throat] before we get into the pages, I want to talk about water and the moon because once you start seeing these two things, you'll see them throughout the whole manuscript.
Our blood is salty, a little like the sea.
Every one of us began life floating in water inside another woman's body.
For a very long time, a month simply was a moon, one cycle from new to full and back again.
The moon takes about twenty-nine and a half days to go through her phases, and the average menstrual cycle is around twenty-nine days.
Scientists still argue about whether that's a coincidence.
Some have studied whether women's cycles ever line up with the moon and have found that for some women, some of the time they seem to.
I'm saying our ancestors noticed the same rhythm, and they didn't think it was an accident, and I definitely don't either.
[laughs] So there's, um, there's a bone found in the mountains of southern Africa, tens of thousands of years old, with twenty-nine notches carved into it.
Some people believe it was a lunar calendar, and some go further and wonder whether it was kept by a woman counting, counting her own cycle against the moon.
Obviously, we'll never know that, but I love that it's possible that one of the oldest calendars on Earth was a woman tracking her own body and her own cycle.
When I open a six-hundred-year-old book and find women in water under the stars surrounded by circles of the sky- I don't think that's random.
I think whoever made it knew something about how these things belong together.
So let's open the book.
The, [sighs] the biggest part of the Voynich Manuscript is the plants.
More than 100 pages of them.
So each one's drawn carefully with writing flowing around the stem and leaves.
And here's the strange thing.
All right, so [clears throat] before we get into the pages, I want to talk about water and the moon because once you start seeing these two things, you'll see them throughout the whole manuscript.
Our blood is salty, a little like the sea.
Every one of us began life floating in water inside another woman's body.
For a very long time, a month simply was a moon, one cycle from new to full and back again.
The moon takes about twenty-nine and a half days to go through her phases, and the average menstrual cycle is around twenty-nine days.
Scientists still argue about whether that's a coincidence.
Some have studied whether women's cycles ever line up with the moon and have found that for some women, some of the time they seem to.
I'm saying our ancestors noticed the same rhythm, and they didn't think it was an accident, and I definitely don't either.
[laughs] So there's, um, there's a bone found in the mountains of southern Africa, tens of thousands of years old, with twenty-nine notches carved into it.
Some people believe it was a lunar calendar, and some go further and wonder whether it was kept by a woman counting, counting her own cycle against the moon.
Obviously, we'll never know that, but I love that it's possible that one of the oldest calendars on Earth was a woman tracking her own body and her own cycle.
When I open a six-hundred-year-old book and find women in water under the stars surrounded by circles of the sky- I don't think that's random.
I think whoever made it knew something about how these things belong together.
So let's open the book.
The, [sighs] the biggest part of the Voynich Manuscript is the plants.
More than 100 pages of them.
So each one's drawn carefully with writing flowing around the stem and leaves.
And here's the strange thing.
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