The blame for this can fall squarely on the Maniculum for introducing me to Sidrak and Bokkus, a medieval text wherein a Babylonian king named Bokkus (or Boctus, or Boccus…) asks several hundred questions to the philosopher Sidrak (or Sidrach, or Sydrac…) who provides some absolutely bonkers medieval-logic answers.
Unfortunately, the Middle English translation doesn’t seem to be easily available online, there is no modern English translation, and the dual-manuscript scholarly edition doesn’t have an ebook or the decency to release after creative commons was invented (This is my box of “translations of ancient and medieval texts should be released under creative commons so that people can freely read and share them” brand soap), and I am too impatient for interlibrary loan. It is on Internet Archive, but you have to have an account and check it out. (As of writing, the volume with the index of questions is checked out by someone else: damn you artificial digital scarcity!)
Anyway: since the master list of goofy medieval worldbuilding questions is out of my reach, I will content myself for now by using the ones that the Maniculum has used for its April Fool’s Day game show episodes.
Some of these questions are very clearly written by a Frenchman in the high middle ages, and are thus exemplars of being weird and uncomfortable.
IMPORTANT EDIT: Skerples has, in an act of sudden heroism, compiled the entire index. The questions are now available.
***
Brother Sidrak has spent the greater part of thirty years compiling a comprehensive survey of the Known World’s knowledge. From east to west and north to south he has wandered along the trade roads and pilgrimage paths with his Book of Questions, seeking volunteers for his great scholastic project. Anyone even modestly cooperative (and in many cases, not cooperative at all) will be peppered with selections from his list of 400-odd queries; whatever answers they give will be dutifully recorded and indexed for later tallying as he calculates which nations and peoples are more or less misguided and in need of salvation (He’s not doing this whole thing to find any answers - he’s certain that he already has them - only to see what other people’s answers are.)
- Appearance: Wrinkled, sun-darkened skin. Habit patched so many times that it now makes for surprisingly good desert camouflage. Thick grey hair and beard turned off-brown from accumulated dust and grime.
- Manner: Inquisitive, hyperfocused, performatively pious. Enjoys facts and lore, cares little for context or nuance. Does not consider differing worldviews worth arguing with or understanding, only recording.
- Wants: To compile all the Known World’s knowledge in a single work (with his name on it, of course); to prove that his sect (and by extension himself) has all the answers.
- Secret: Has a bastard son out there who has come into some notoriety on his own.
The following answers and their attendant questions were selected at random from volume twelve of the fifth book, The Vulgar, Also Called Cutters, Delvers, Vagrants, Hobos, and Gentlemen of the Road.
***
1. How are birds held aloft in the air?
- “All birds are avatars of the Simiurgh, who alone possesses the power of flight.”
- “Their bones are hollow and very light, and their wings push against the air like our feet push against the earth.”
- “As offspring of the dragon and the phoenix, birds are aligned with both fire and air, and thus naturally live above the earth and sea”
- “It’s punishment for their rebellion against the giants in the age before the sun.”
- “They are puppetted around on strings by Atlakhnakha for her amusement and our ruin.”
- “What the fuck is a bird?”
2. What becomes of falling stars after they fall?
- “Ever seen a fresh angel corpse? Wildest shit. They’ve got white meat, gold blood, feathers like a peacock show, and they don't rot. There’s one out past Jangar, fell a couple decades ago. Splattered itself across half the township when it hit. Might still be some bones left.”
- “The smith-priests of Kogan-Usan forge their metallic cores into the weapons of kings. Three are known to us, four are missing, an eighth is suspected and a ninth is pure supposition.”
- “They hatch into a dragon.”
- “They disgorge a legion of evil spirits and vile phantasms, after which they suck the vril from the land and poison all plants and animals that live there. They do this to restore their inner fires before returning to the heavens.”
3. Why is the Moon cold and the Sun hot?
- “The moon used to be hot, but it died and cooled off. That was before the demons took it over from the Moon King.”
- “If you look closely, you can see the sigil of the Frost Witch inscribed on the cislunar surface.”
- “Well one of them’s on fucking fire, ain’t it?”
- “It’s only temporary; the seasons of the heavenly bodies are extremely long, and they run opposite each other. The sun will enter autumn soon, and the moon will warm in its spring.”
- “The sun was made of Ghanjuk’s golden heart, the moon from his blinded left eye.”
- “You’ve got it backwards; heat and cold are extensions of Sunness and Moonness.”
4. Of which are there more, grains of earth or drops of water?
- “Trick question; their natural state is a singular whole, as evidenced by the tendency of both substances to coalesce. In this way every grain of earth and every drop of water is merely a temporary and circumstantial separation.”
- “They are two elements in a single substance, just in different concentrations along a dirt-water gradient.”
- “This line of inquiry was judged to be of sufficient stupidity to revoke the favor of Heaven and banned at the Council of Hanharrat, as was the counting of angels found on pinheads; you are committing heresy by entertaining it.”
5. How many stars are in the sky?
- “Doesn’t matter, you only need to care about the seven that hate you.”
- “Twenty-one myriads of myriads, exactly. Minus one for the Betrayer.”
- “Only one star exists, and it is the Sun; the things called stars are enormous luminescent creatures similar to a great fish or a whale that drift through the aether and feed on moonlight.”
6. Why are some people tall and some short?
- “God saw fit to put the manhood of my enemies at the level of my fists.”
- “Trends of height come from residual influence of the giants. Most likely, the very tall were born in a land above one of the more intact corpses.”
- “The gods play dice with each soul, and this determines the qualities of the body they inhabit.”
7. What kind of apple did Adam eat?
- “It wasn’t the apple that was the issue, it was the cider. Drunkenness is the root of all evils.”
- “It was the golden fruit of the Hesperides, stolen by Eris and tossed casually into the garden as Adam was naming the zoa and valar. Adam, of course, escalated matters when his answer to the question of who was most beautiful was to ask to sleep with all three of the Tridevae. Simultaneously. He was ambitious, if nothing else.”
- “Common misconception, there are no apples in the land of Uz: it was a fig. A nasty, rotten fig filled with the larvae of wasps, for good and evil is terrible knowledge to have.”
- “Eve’s.” [Sidrak notes here that he does not know why the woman waggled her tongue.]
- “As best as modern scholarship can determine, it was the fruiting body of a shoggoth that had entered its sessile semi-vegetative life stage. This triggered a dramatic increase in neuron density.”
- “A stolen one. The angels had entrusted Lilith with care of the Tree; Adam wished to be like God but would not stand for having to share it with anyone else.”
8. Why do people sneeze?
- “Dust? Pollen? I don’t know what you want from me, man, my nose gets tickled and I sneeze.”
- “Some people say it is caused by invisible sickness spirits: modern natural science has taught us that it is in fact caused by extremely small sickness spirits!”
- “Your ancestors are fucking in the underworld.”
- “It’s the signal of a failed der0 transmission from the Air Loom.”
- “Your astral self has detected the presence of a nearby ghost.”
- “The air at the bottom of your lungs is old and needs replaced."
9. What is the greenest thing in the world?
- “Couldn’t tell you, I’m colorblind.”
- “The gossamer robes of the Emerald Emperor, lord of all elves.”
- “There is no green more beautiful than the countenance of Yha’galuush, orc god(dess) of love and sex. To see a single glimpse of them is to see the greatest treasure on the earth.”
- “A tree in early summer, about midmorning or so, when the sun is warm and the sky is clear, and a faint breeze rustles the leaves above your head.”
- “Saw this one malachite idol once. Someone in one of the other cutter camps had dragged it out of the Tomb of the Serpent Kings and was showing it off. Got his ass cursed for it. Anyway, it was really green.”
10. What is the best animal?
- “Dogs is gods, y’know.”
- “The elephant; they are both the wisest and most moral of all creatures, far beyond mankind in both capacities.”
- “There’s this kind of slug down below - very brightly colored, glows in the dark - that feeds on blood. Its ooze foams up and gets gummy when it hits air, and it cleans inflection from a wound. See this scar on my neck? Woulda died without one of those things. Don’t eat em, though, poisonous as hell; numbs you for a while, then excruciating pain.”
- “The Questing Beast is of symbolic primacy, for it is the human condition; chasing that which we can’t ever catch.”
- “Dragons. Because if they can die, so can kings.”
- “Is not man merely an ape who has stolen fire from the gods?”
11. Why is seawater salty?
- “They are made of the Moon’s tears, after she was rebuked by the archons for changing her face.”
- “Lot’s wife was a giant, one of the Nephilim.”
- “It was struck by the star of Wormwood at the birth of the gods.”
- “It used to be blood!”
- “It is a vast dilute ooze, slowly dissolving the stone of the world.”
- “Fish piss.”
12. When dogs fuck, why are they more tightly joined than other animals?
- [Much of the page is taken up by a bloodstain and a note explaining that the interviewee, a cynocephalon from the kingdom of Prester John, had punched Brother Sidrak very hard in the nose when asked this question.]
13. Why did God make the Earth round like a ball?
- “It is the ideal shape for pondering.”
- “Easier for the elephants to keep balanced on their backs when the turtle moves, discs are usually too unstable for life to develop.”
- If you look at this diagram you will see that it is in fact a concave depression surrounded by vast walls of ice that then forms a dodecahedron…”
14. Is magic real?
- “Earlier today I lit a man on fire by snapping my fingers and then sold his possessions to a talking plant who walks the dying neurons of Yog-Sothoth. What do you fucking think?”
- “As everything that exists exists within nature, the supernatural cannot exist. Magic exists, therefore it is natural, and therefore it is not magic.”
15. Where in the body does the soul live?
- “In the lungs, with the breath.”
- “In the heart, with the blood.”
- “In the stomach, with the heat.”
- “In the testicles, with the seed.”
- “In the eyes, the brain, and the hands, where ideas turn to actions.”
- “In the womb, where two are made one.”
16. Why are some people white, some black, and some brown?
- “Presumably because they are not blue, red, or purple as they are in my homeland.”
- “You see only three colors in mankind? Such dullness”
- “I can only speak to the first; an albinic is a test from the gods, to see if men lose their wits and their morals when confronted with one who is different.”
- “Because humans, sadly, have lost their beautiful fur.”
- “God ran out of colored ink after painting all the birds and fish.”
17. If someone is deaf, blind, and mute, in what language do they think?
- “The feral howling that undergirds all of reality.”
- “Standardized Mi-Go Interface Language, if their ancestry can be traced back to Atlantis; otherwise they will think in either Ural-Altaic, Dravido-Koreanic, or Dene-Caucasian depending on which son of Noah their people descend from.”
- “None at all; they will think in pure thought, as the gods do. This is why they are so powerful in the magical arts.”
18. How should one remove a bone or thorn stuck in the throat?
- “Don’t eat things with thorns? Or at least pluck them out first, Jesus.”
- “The Von Heimlich Maneuver.”
- “I keep forgetting humans can’t just eat bones.”
19. Should the rich be judged in the same way as the poor?
- “Gods, I wish.”
- “No, because at least that way they’re honest about fucking us over.”
- “Of course not! Do you understand how long it took to quarantine all the rich men of the world on the Golden Isle? Bringing them to court for any of their heinous crimes against God, nature, and their fellow man would remind them that the rest of us exist! May God bless and keep those bastards as far away from us as possible.”
- “I do not know. We do not have poor men in my country, though I suspect it is because we have yet to invent rich men.”
20. Why does shit stink?
- “It’s filled with the angry but extremely weak ghosts of everything you ate.”
- “You’d smell like shit too if you were chewed up and dunked in stomach bile.”
- “All the good qualities of the food have been taken into the body, leaving behind only the bad parts, and this produces the miasmatic effect.”
21. What animal lives the longest?
- “It’s a sliding scale of turtles. Small turtles, medium turtles, big turtles, zaratans, world-turtles, turtles all the way up and down.”
- “Not animals, but trees: Mighty Pando was old long before mankind was shaped from the clay.”
- “I was nineteen, and had just signed up with a mercenary company heading eastward. We went all the way to World’s End Lake before turning round, but when we were there - I don’t even recall what we were doing there anymore - we saw the Dragon. Not a dragon, the Dragon. She that watched the iron star fall from the sky and destroy the world of the Feathered Men. Was nearly eighty years ago now that I saw her, and those years are nothing. She has lived them a thousand thousand times over.”
22. What are the best colors of clothing to wear?
- “Context-dependent on what monster is trying to eat you - some manner of dappled green, brown, or grey is good for general purpose, but you’ll want to be careful about the saturation and contrast depending on what colors it can see. Not knowing a monster’s visible spectrum is a sure way for a greenhorn to get killed. Oh, and scrambler patterns are good to throw off enemy wizards, they have a real difficult time targeting you if they can’t make out your face.”
- “Blue. Dunno why, I just like it.”
- “A black tunic with a white sash, for that is what Emar wore when he assassinated the Five-and-One Emperors.”
23. What is the worthiest day of the year?
- “The vernal equinox, when we renew our vows with the spirits of the world.”
- “May the 25th, in honor of the One-Night Republic and the start of the Revolution.”
- “Calendrical division of time is arbitrary and false; all days are sacred.”
- “Every alternating Friday, ‘cause that’s when the paycheck clears.”
- “The vigil night of Inti, our lost Bringer of Day.”
24. What happens to fire after it goes out?
- “It reverts to its invisible aerial state as phlogiston.”
- “It is gone forever, and the cosmos is diminished.”
- “It returns to the smaller sun. Mankind has yet to steal fire from the greater sun.”
- “It is dead, having reached the end of its lifespan. Such elementals are brief things, compared with those of water and earth, yet not so brief as those of the air.”
25. How may a child come out of its mother’s womb?
- “Bloody, naked, and screaming battle-cries against this cruel world and its demiurge.”
- “Sometimes by surgery, sometimes by miracle, usually with great difficulty.”
- “What is a ‘womb’? Is that a variety of forge? Do you not carve new descendants out of the living stone?”
- “I’ve had three of the little bastards, and let me tell you, we made a mistake when we gave up laying eggs.”
- “You…use their true name to summon them out of the mother without pain or struggle? Like a reasonable person?”
26. How many children may a woman carry in her womb at one time?
- “One to three, barring any mythical importance. Then it can go up to seven, though I only know of one case in written memory. Which means we have two or possibly just one left before the end of the world, to satisfy the Law of Threes.”
27. What causes animals to go mad?
- “The Hell Star, obviously.”
- “Cannibalism of their own kind. Prion disease is scary shit.”
- “Long-term isolation within a zoological garden.”
- “Pain, stress, and loneliness, otherwise diseases of the mind or the influence of dread powers. Same as with man.”
28. Which women give the most benefit & delight to men?
- “I do, it’s me, it was me all along. My hips don’t lie and my thighs save lives. You’re welcome, men.”
- “Call me when you find a man who provides any benefit or delight to a woman and I might have an answer for you.”
- “Making some bold assumptions today, are we?”
- “A succubus woven from the hot black flame, bound by mask and name to fit the sorcerer’s specific desires. She will, inevitably and justly, stick a knife in his neck and string his corpse from the tower balcony as a warning.”
- “I do not consent to adventure in your magical realm. Away wi’ ye, foul wizard!”
29. What is the best and worst body part of man?
- “Oh fuck you, man. This is such an obvious setup to get me to say ‘his cock’, and then you’ll launch into a sermon about the importance of semen retention or some shit.”
- “His cock, obviously.”
30. Why did Noah take evil animals, such as scorpions, adders, and snakes, onto the ark?
- “He owed the Serpent a favor.”
- “I question why snakes are here twice while wasps are not mentioned at all. Scorpions only sting you if you fuck around with them and then you deserve it.”
- “One; because God said every animal. Two; no animal but man has knowledge of good and evil and thus all harmful animals are innocent by way of ignorance.”
- “Ah, it’s metaphorical, you see. Representative of a mass extinction event some thirty thousand years before Christ that saw a resurgence of the flying polyps.”
31. Which gives greater cunning, hot food or cold food?
- “Well, it’s not whatever I’m eating now. What the fuck is with you people and food temperature?”
- “If I eat a frozen chili pepper, is it cold or hot?”
- “Do I look like someone who cooks their food? I’m a fucking ghoul.”
- “Hot, naturally; you try thinking straight with a brain freeze.”
- “Cold, obviously; hot foods overheat and may potentially melt the brain. Your thoughts become sluggish, in any case.”
- “You must be one of those ‘salt has too much flavor’ types, eh?”
32. Sort from most to least numerous: animals, humans, fish, birds
- “Trick question; all of these are fish.”
- “What the fuck is a bird?”
33. Should people greet each other whenever they meet?
- “Hardly! Repeated headbutting, even for an orc, is bound to leave lasting damage.”
34. Which is worthier, maidenhood or virginity?
- “I have dealt with a lot of men who can’t get any and I used to be a preteen girl: both groups possess an immeasurable capacity for evil.”
- “Best of all is to be a kind and considerate lover.”
- “Never ask this question again.”
- “Motherfuckers like you who think virginity is magical are why I was sold into slavery in a unicorn slaughterhouse when I was eight. Crawl up your own ass and drown in shit.”
35. How are worms bred in the body and how do they feed?
- “Oh, do you not know? Congratulations! Today you get to learn about endoparasitic wasps!”
36. On what day and at what time will the Final Judgement occur?
- “Whatever the day, thanks to time zones it will take place at all hours at once.”
- “The final judgement will never occur, as the increased population of Earth has clearly overloaded the celestial bureaucracy and made it unable to render preliminary judgement - that’s why no one gets smote anymore.”
- “No one knows the day or the hour, dipshit.”
