Within the manuscript’s 240 pages are vibrant sketches, including over a hundred unknown plant species, mysterious astral charts and drawings of nude women.

The women in the ancient book are odd, evoking a crude H.R. Giger, except for the fact that the images predate the Swiss surrealist’s paintings by centuries. In the words of Yale’s Beinecke Library, which seldom displays the manuscript from a vault in its collection, the women have “swelled abdomens” and are “immersed or wading in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules.”

Stranger still, the swirls of script filling the pages of the book — known as the Voynich Manuscript — are as inscrutable as the slime trails left by a garden slug. Yale University calls it a scientific or magical text, circa 1401 to 1599 (although that range is appended with a question mark), and believes the script is a cipher based on Roman letters.

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