The astonishment of birth

This small illustration—tiny, really—is a fragment of the constellation Gemini in the Voynich Manuscript. Looking at a very detailed and purportedly inexplicable set of images like this usually causes one’s eyes to glaze over; and it’s only the will to serious attention to detail that can cause the casual observer to drill down into details like this, where one suddenly begins to appreciate the care and expression that the artist put in to each individual detail. There are so many itsy-bitsy women in this manuscript that, like images in the center panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthy Delights, one forgets that at one time someone actually cared about each figure and what it meant.

That they were part of a forgotten language.

Here is a single word:

A gravid woman in her fourth month touches a star in astonishment.