The Summoning

Though we may fear the unknown, human beings also can't seem to stay away from it. That's why we have always tried to find ways to contact the unseen, and why some have gone a step further and tried to control the djinn using powerful invocations, or even making deals with their very own souls. This week we explore the many ways people have summoned the djinn.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. You might

(00:31):
recall the story I shared much earlier in the season
about family friends that had a number of young sons
who used to scare the daylights out of me and
my siblings with gin tails from their village back home
in Pakistan. Frankly, I was pretty disappointed that our own
relatives never shared any gin stories, but I talked it
up to the fact that we were city folk. Maybe

(00:52):
it wasn't the villages that the real gin action took place,
and unfortunately we didn't have a village. In my preteen years,
I got more interested in the occult, and because my
own family had pretty much nothing to contribute, I sought
out every book on the subject in the tiny local
library where we lived in Western Maryland. Demonic possession haunted

(01:12):
houses of vampires and zombies UFOs, well, they were all
gin to me. I was always walking the line between
fear and fascination, but I couldn't get enough, and it
was in those books that I learned that people didn't
have to be hapless by standards in supernatural encounters. We
could actually control those encounters communicate with these forces, even

(01:34):
summoned them, and I wanted to try. So I saved
up to fourteen dollars needed to buy a Wigia board
from Kmart, no small feat for a kid in the
nineteen eighties, and I fearfully gave it a try alone
in my bedroom one night. My little sister refused to
join me, and my little brother well he was too little,
so it was just me and that board. I admit

(01:56):
that my attempt was half hearted. I both wanted but
didn't want to conjure up spirits. The first and only
question I asked when I positioned that tear shaped, clear
plastic pointer on the board, was HI, Is anyone there?
Then suddenly I thought, what if I end up inviting
things into our house I couldn't get rid of. My

(02:17):
parents would kill me. So I quickly folded up the
board and shoved it back into the box. Not waiting
for an answer to my question, I blew out the
candle that was melting on my dresser, and the next
day I gave the board to a girl at school,
and I never asked her if it worked or not.
I wasn't sure I really wanted to know. The next
time we met those family friends. Though I told the

(02:37):
boys what I had tried, and they laughed at me.
That wasn't the way to do it. A cheap board
from Kmart. I really thought that would be enough. No,
If you wanted to summon the gin with all their
powers and make sure that you're able to control the powers,
it takes a test of your own fortitude and courage.
Back in their village, a few brave souls had taken

(02:58):
the test, some had passed, but most had failed. The
summoning required a person to first spend thirty days in
prayer and fasting to purify and prepare their bodies and
souls for the ordeal. At the end of thirty days,
you had to spend the night in a cemetery, seated
inside a tight circle drawn in the dirt. Throughout the night,

(03:18):
demons would terrorize you, trying to get you to flee
in fear from that circle. But you can't leave the circle.
You can't sleep, you can't eat or drink, you can't
stretch an arm or a leg. You must spend the
entire night from the time the sun sets to when
dawn breaks, keeping still and reciting prayers. If your prayers
ever falter, or you doze off, or even so much

(03:40):
as your foot slides across the boundary of that circle,
you fail the test. And failing the test didn't mean
you got a do over. Failing the test meant you'd
be killed by the same gin you were trying to summon.
So this was not an undertaking for the faint of
heart or the wishy. She like me. It was high risk,

(04:02):
but also high reward, because if you pass that test
and made it through the night, you now controlled the
gin that you summoned, and all of their powers were
now your powers. I'm rad and I'll be your guide
into the ancient world of the hidden gin. Welcome. If

(04:31):
you've been waiting for a female ginny that is one
of the most efficient at making your wishes come true,
and who will protect you and love you and bring
you all the good things in life. It does not
get better than this. She has had some fantastically beautiful
times with her previous masters and mistresses and will always
love and care for you. She has no morals, and
her specialty is to make you feel loved and cherished

(04:53):
and protect you from all harm. She is extremely good
at what she does and is desperate to please you
and is willing to be shared if that's what her
master desires. All she wants is to pleasure you. You
can expect to be romanced, flirted with, massaged, and tied
down the way jin do without anything at all, and
then pleasured until you demand her to stop. She is

(05:13):
absolutely stunning, with a body to die for and golden hair.
She also has a beautiful nature. You will never be
lonely with her at your side. You will never be
sad or have bad luck ever again. Even when you
come out of this page, you will be able to
close your eyes and see her face. You will feel
warm inside, and you're to have her in your life,
touching your heart and protecting you against all earthly troubles.

(05:34):
All this and more can be yours for just That
might sound like the most ridiculous made up infomercial ever,
but what I just read to you is one of hundreds,
if not thousands, of actual listings on eBay for an
item of jewelry that comes with its very own gin.
There are rings, amulets, all kinds of items, and you

(05:57):
can take your pick of the litter, not just with
the physical eye um spot with a kind of gin
that you're looking for, and eBay isn't the only place
you can find such items. A South African company called
Paranormal Spirits has a wide array of gin summoning items
for sale on I have to admit, a pretty modern
and convincing looking website. You can take your pick of
the gin litter. What do you want that gin to

(06:19):
do for you? Be your lover, bring you wealth, destroy
your enemies. Paranormal Spirits has it all. Five thousand year
old Norse gin and three thousand year old Egyptian gin.
Terrifying if free gin and seductive hair em gin all
come neatly packaged, presumably into the rings that you can
buy from them. If you're not a ring person, well

(06:39):
try a spell bound oil, perfume or an incense that
will draw them to you. And if that doesn't work,
no worries. You can buy for a sweet price a
vial of red mercury from the store. The gin apparently
covet red mercury because it helps increase their lifespan. So
if you've got yourself a vial, well, it's a perfect
bargaining tool to get what you want from them. How

(07:01):
exactly you'll get in touch with them to enter negotiations
isn't clear, but maybe it comes with an instruction manual. Now, look,
if you think a pretty bottle of oil or a
cheap ring from eBay will bring you the power to
lord over the gin, well, I've got a fourteen dollar
Wigia board I'd like to sell you. If only summoning
the gin was so easy, which is why the eBay

(07:22):
listings come with buy or beware warnings like this law
state I must add that my readings are for entertainment
purposes only. You must be at least eighteen years old
to make this purchase. You agree that any items purchased
our subject to your own interpretation. My services are not
substitute for legal, medical, financial, psychiatric, or any other kind
of professional service or care. I am not responsible for
the outcome of any situation that may occur as a

(07:42):
result of any product or service you may purchase from me,
or of your participation in any way. By purchasing my services,
you are stating that you are aware of and agree
to these terms. So it seems that will not exactly
get you the ring of King Solomon. Now, the reliability
of online purchases aside, there's no question that throughout all

(08:02):
of human history we have been trying to make contact
with the unknown, and we've left behind extensive literature and
text on how to do it. Even though invoking the
Gin is forbidden by most traditions, but forbidding something, as
we all know, just makes the temptation even sweeter. There

(08:29):
are those who believe even whispering the known names of
the Gin is enough to call them to you, but
usually it takes a lot more than that. Nearly a
millennia ago, in the early eleventh century, the Persian Sufi
scholar an aesthetic Mohammad alta Basi what a treatise called
the Comprehensive Compendium to the entire See a rather misleading

(08:50):
title if you ask me. That's because this treatise is
perhaps one of the best known and most widely used,
not to understand sea creatures, but to subject a gate
occult forces. Tobasi warns that there are two ways to
conjure the Gin, an illicit way and a permissible way.
The illicit way is by calling on dark forces and

(09:11):
committing heinous and degrading acts like blood sacrifices or sexual deviation,
but the legitimate way, according to Tobasi is by invoking
what is pure and sacred. To that end, he cites
a range of sacred scriptures such as the Torah, the Gospel,
and the Qur'an. That's also how he gets around the
prohibition against conjuring Jin, rationalizing that his spells are in

(09:33):
accordance with Islamic law as long as they are performed
through virtue and not through sin. The collection of incantations, charms,
and the combination of written and recited spells claimed to
be effective in commanding both angels and gin and to
obtain supernatural powers through their aid, both for good and
nefarious purposes. For the super committed, reciting all the spells

(09:56):
will give you command over the entire range of demons
that he lists, including the Lady Queen, one of the
daughters of the Devil, or the Indian demon King Mahakal.
Tabasi himself was famous for his alleged own ability to
subjugate the Gin, and that ability drew his contemporaries to
him to ask for his help. One well known story

(10:17):
tells of the time the famous Muslim scholar Rosali asked
to Bassi to show him what the Jin look like.
Tabasi did so, and Rozali saw them as shadows on
a wall. Then Rosali asked to Bassi if he could
speak with them, but Tobassi basically responded, maybe another time.
Tabasi's book offers precise and specific instructions on how to

(10:39):
subjugate the jin to do your bidding, and in many
cases the spells involved the preparation of charms and talisman.
Each spell is different depending on what you're trying to achieve.
Do you want to make someone fall in love with you?
Are you trying to destroy an enemy? Do you need
help from a gin to ward off evil? Are you
searching for the location of something precious, something or someone

(10:59):
you've Maybe your charm might require objects made out of paper, leather, parchment,
metal disks and tablets, or jewelry like signet rings, but
no worries Tobasi has you coverned. Throughout the book, Tibassi
draws out the various magical symbols necessary for the spells,
and divulges the numerological configurations and incantations needed for success.

(11:23):
Some spells require you to invoke the forces of good
angels and prophets and saints and of course God, but
in others Tobasi says, you'll have to go to the
dark side and invoke the Gin directly, often the most
powerful of them, like the seven Gin Kings and their
king Satan himself. While Tabasi's work made rereak of heresy

(11:47):
to the Orthodox, he was fairly well accepted as part
of a long standing tradition of what were known as
gin binders, those people who possess the power and knowledge
to bend the Gin to their will. Another one of
the most famous such gin binders was Ahmed Albuni, a
thirteenth century North African mystic who is said to have

(12:08):
mastered the esoteric and occult sciences. While there's not much
known about him, he left behind more than forty writings
in which he referenced Plato, Aristotle, Hermez, and various Chaldean
magicians that he was influenced by. Even today, Albuni's body
of work is among the main sources of occultism, magic,
and secret knowledge in Muslim societies. One of those books

(12:33):
contains a set of twenty four names from the Arabic
alphabet used for summoning our conjuration, and they are said
to date all the way back to the Biblical prophet
Enoch even before being used by King Solomon. So clearly
the pedigree of these invocations is ancient and very well preserved.
While it's not hard to get a hold of either

(12:54):
Albuni or Tabasi's texts because they're both easily available online,
albeit in their original Arabic, they were never meant for
the masses. All Mooney specifically warned that his books were
meant for the select few, those with the wisdom and
knowledge to do good by them. Using them for evil
would return evil, using them for good would return good.

(13:15):
And beyond that, you also had to have a certain
level of spiritual insight and fortitude to get results, because
these metaphysical practices only opened portals of power for those
who had demonstrated years, if not decades, of spiritual and
intellectual discipline. After all, as haff As, a thirteenth century
Persian Sufi master and poet, said, quote, a man must

(13:38):
be a Solomon before this magical seal will work. Now,
I'm not saying that a lay person wouldn't get anything
out of these spells. It's just while folks like you
and I might not be able to control whatever we
inadvertently unleash, there are many reasons some one may want

(14:02):
to reach out to the Gin, communicate with them, or
even command them to their bidding. One very common one
that may not have occurred to you is this the
Gin can help tell the future. Not to be clear,
the Gin on their own have no power to predict
the future, none at all. In fact, while the Gin
are physically strong, they're believed to be pretty basic and
their cognitive abilities Scholars have said one reason human kind

(14:26):
is considered a superior creation to the Gin is because
of our ability to imagine. Human beings can conceive of ideas, technologies, possibilities,
worlds they've never seen and have never existed, and turned
that imagination into reality, whereas the Gin have no such ability.
They just know what they know. But they are faster

(14:47):
than humans could ever hope to be, and they can
flit through different dimensions in the blink of an eye,
which is why they're able to help humans that call
upon them predict the future in two ways. First, it's
said that legions of gin and are connected to one
another in a vast cosmic grape vine, and they're able
to carry news from one place to another instantly. What

(15:08):
happens in one part of the world can immediately be
conveyed on the other end of the globe if you're
plugged into that grape vine. Now this might not seem
like a big deal in the age of the Internet
and social media, but imagine being able to do this
party trick a hundred years ago. But what about the
things that haven't happened yet in any part of the world.
After all, there have been many people throughout history who

(15:29):
have successfully predicted events well into the future. Nostronomous is
well known in our part of the world, but hundreds
of years before him, there was all budger Baki, a
famous Syrian esoteric seer who predicted dozens of major events
through what was called mystical unveiling. People like all Budger
Baky weren't very well regarded by the powers that be. However,

(15:52):
this is what the famous Orthodox scholar I Been Kuldoon
had to say about the fortune teller. In the towns,
we find a group of people who strive to make
a living out of predicting the future because they know
that the people are most eager to know it. Therefore,
they set themselves up in the streets and in shops
and all day long, the women and children of the town,
and indeed many weak minded men as well come and

(16:14):
ask them to foretell the future for them, how it
will affect their business, their rank, their friendships, their enmities,
and similar things. There are those who make their predictions
from sandwriting, geomancy. Others make their predictions by casting pebbles
and grains of wheat. Still others make their predictions by
looking into mirrors and into water. These are reprehensible things

(16:35):
because their reprehensible character is established by religious law, and
because supernatural knowledge is veiled and hidden from human beings.
But all Budjerbaki wasn't any old corner store fortune teller
divining someone's romantic prospects. He was a seer of the
highest order, sometimes predicting global events with incredible specificity, like

(16:59):
a prediction about the emergence of a lame Turkic warlord
that would take over a vast region to the east.
Many of all Butcherbaki's predictions were cryptic, though, like this poem.
Listen and comprehend letters and their numerical values and the
description and be understanding like a clever and intelligent person.

(17:19):
The Lord of the heavens will tell concerning Egypt and
what is to be in Syria of good things and
of tribulations, alas Damascus, what descended upon its territory and
then burn of young men and old existence is dark
and the land is blacked out. Even the pigeons, they're
moren on the branches, Oh, poor creatures. Is there no

(17:41):
helper for the religion? Get up, all of you and
go to Syria. From the plains and the rugged hills.
The Arabs of the Iraq and lower and Upper Egypt
are coming. The firm resolution is to bring death to
unbelief in Damascus. Being cryptic was one of the numerous
reasons that he was announced by the Orthodox clergy at
the time. They thought he was just a complete fraud,

(18:04):
someone who made vague predictions that people could read into,
which is a common fortune telling trick for sure, But
more seriously, he was also labeled a heretic, accused of
summoning not just the Gin, but entering into a pack
with Satan himself, a pack that would give him access
to the unseen world of the Gin and to the future,
which takes us to the second way that Gin are

(18:25):
able to help humans predict the future by interfering with
divine communications. According to the tradition, wicked gin will fly
as close as they can to the seventh heaven where
the angels are receiving divine commands from God, and essentially
they'll eavesdrop. They aren't able to hear everything clearly, though,
because oftentimes they're chased away by the angels. And you

(18:47):
may have witnesses happening yourself. Actually because shooting stars, well
it said those stars are being flung by angels at
nosy Gin. When the gin returns to report what they've
overheard to the human fortune teller that commission their service,
they'll make up things to add to their report because remember,
they don't always hear everything accurately. They may only have

(19:07):
bits and pieces of the whole picture. And that's why
when fortunes are told, there are often truths mixed with lies.
So again, the gin on their own are not able
to see the future. They have to steal the information
from upon high, which they do by breaking the rules.
And the person who sent them there is also breaking
the rules, which is why Orthodox religious leaders weren't having

(19:30):
it so for this and other religious crimes, all budger
Baki was condemned to death. Of course, he probably also
saw that coming, so he fled to safety from Damascus
to Egypt. Al Buker Baji later returned to Damascus, though,
where he died in the year thirteen twenty four. Oh And,
by the way, fifty years after all Bukar Baji's death,

(19:52):
and undefeated Turkic Mongoldian conqueror emerged, taking over southwest and
Central Asia as the most powerful ruler the vast Muslim
world had ever seen. His name was tim or Lane,
also known as Tim Moore the Lame. Back in the day,

(20:18):
it was pretty well understood that summoning the Gin was
the province of the expert, disciplined mystic. But maybe this
was just a gatekeeping device to keep a certain class
of people uninformed and controllable and another class of people
well employed and powerful. Well. We no longer live in
those times. The Internet has democratized the tools necessary to

(20:39):
communicate with the Gin, and you don't need an esteemed
scholarly intermediary to get right down to it. Spells needed
to conjure the Gin are easy to find online. Entire books,
including both ancient and more contemporary collections, are yours to
have at the click of a button, and there are
nearly a dozen pages on a Gin fandom wiki site
that provides specific and occations and how many times you're

(21:01):
supposed to say them for different gin. I even found
a post on Reddit that tells you exactly how to
summon the seven Gin King, and on the website white
Magic Mastery dot com you can get a book and
a webinar for the low lo fee of s on
what is claimed to be the most powerful invocation of
them all, the Berta. While I can't vouch for the website,

(21:25):
the Bertha invocation heralds back to the time of the
biblical prophet Enoch and was passed through King Solomon and
is considered the mother of all summonings. There is almost
no classical summoning grimoire that doesn't contain it, and one
of the reasons it's most powerful is because it calls
upon an ancient covenant taken not with a single Gin,

(21:48):
but with all the Gin as well as the rest
of the supernatural world. It's said that the covenant was
taken at the Gate of Ishtar, one of the eight
gates leading to the innermost part of ancient Babylon, the
city whose name literally means the doorway to God. The
magnificent Gait, one of the seven Wonders of the ancient world,

(22:10):
was constructed by the powerful Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar the second
and five seventy five BC, and it was the starting
point to the procession to the temple of the Mesopotamian
deity Marduk, a deity associated with, among other things, magic.
So yeah, this covenant goes back a long long way.

(22:30):
It's unbreakable, and it will exist until the end of time.
When you use the bird invocation, all supernatural creations are
subject to the pact, including not just the jin, the
good and the bad, with the demons too and the
angels as well, and they must all respond. The conjuration

(22:51):
itself is often written in a circular vortex with the
words swirling to the center, ending in a three by
three cube with letters arranged crip to leon it, but
many have written extensively and at length about the conjuration,
including Ahmed Albouni, thirteen century Gin master we talked about earlier,
whose book shar albert Ata is seminal in the education

(23:13):
of any aspiring gin binder or sorcerer. While the origins
of the spell aren't exactly clear, Alboni attributes it to
King Solomon, and before him a Jewish mystic by the
name of ASoft ben Bakaya, and before him an unnamed
Greek sage. Alboni prefaces his book by noting that the

(23:34):
spell is obeyed by all spiritual forces, good or bad,
and the conjuring itself is fairly uncomplicated. It's a series
of twenty eight Hebrew Syriac names that Alboni transliterates to Arabic.
But before you get to the actual names, you must
proceed the invocation by a charge to protective powers by

(23:54):
the greatest and mightiest name, which came to be in
the atoms were formed from nothingness, and the light of
all lights burst with such power as to create multitudes
and multitudes of stars within the womb of the ever
expanding universe. I call you almighty and blindingly luminous Master Angels, Gabriel, Michael, Raphil,

(24:15):
and Israel. I call you almighty and blindingly luminous master Angels,
the Hamlaiel Metatron, and Chaanthiel, who reside over the armies
of spiritual spirits and nations of the Gin to facilitate
for me servants from under your domain who are bound
by the covenant of the Barhatia to assist me in
my spiritual and material pursuits and requests. This takes us

(24:41):
to the actual invocation itself, because you may be wondering, well,
what are those twenty eight names so powerful that every angel, demon,
and supernatural entity in between can't resist. Well, there none
other than some of the most powerful names of God. Oh,
oh Holy, oh everlasting, Oh self subsisting, Oh the adored One,

(25:05):
OH Peace, Oh Victorious, Oh Powerful, oh praised One, Oh merciful,
Oh the one for whom is all the glory. You
may not be familiar with the concept of God having
many names, and really the names are just descriptors or
titles for his attributes and powers, But there's a rich
Semitic tradition of calling upon God by using these names. Now,

(25:28):
I admit being surprised when I realized that the most
powerful conjuring formula in all of history, the one that
no jin could refuse to respond to, was in fact
just the names of God. But then again, it makes sense.
If you believe in gin, you believe that God created
them and if he created them, then only he really
has the power to compel them, and the way for

(25:50):
jin conjurors to tap into that power is through the names.
In the Jewish tradition, God has seven most holy names that,
once written, cannot be erased. Beyond these seven, there are
dozens of other names ascribed to God. Jewish mystics, the
Cabbalists believe in a powerful formula containing seventy two names
of God, and then there is one name, the one

(26:12):
so powerful and holy that no one is allowed to
utter it. The cryptic four letter tetra grammaton, represented by
the letters y H W H, rumored to have been
engraved on the ring that gave King Solomon the power
to control all the gin now. In the Muslim tradition,
there are nine commonly known names of God, which are

(26:33):
often invoked depending on what you're trying to achieve. But
they say there is also one name which is the greatest.
No one exactly knows what it is. Some say that
it's contained somewhere in the ninety nine names. Some say
it's the name a law itself. Others say it's a
hundredth name known only to the prophets, and maybe maybe

(26:53):
to a few y sages who guard it with their lives.
To me, the mystery behind this name, this most great
and powerful name, sounds very much like what is believed
about the Tetragrammaton. In the nineteen twenties, British traveler and
writer Rosita Forbes spent much time in remote parts of
the Muslim world, and her writings often feature stories about

(27:15):
jin and magic, and her encounters with mystics who were
well versed in both. One of them, a Moroccan sage,
told her that with the ninety nine names of God
he could raise a gin, and with the use of
the hundredth name, they would grant every wish and prayer.
She might have been skeptical if she had not witnessed
on numerous occasions a summoning herself. In one instance, while

(27:38):
in Yemen, she sat with a mystic in the middle
of a courtyard next to the tomb of a saint
and asked him to summon a gin. The man drew
a large pentagram in the dirt floor, marked it with symbols,
and began meditating and silently invoking the names of God.
All at once, a man appeared out of nowhere, sitting
inside the pentagram. He was pale and dressed like a local,

(28:00):
and looked to be sweating profusely. The two men began
to talk, but while Forbes could only understand the holy Man,
the newcomer's language was incomprehensible. She could make out grunts
but understood nothing he was saying to the mystic who
had summoned him, and then just as he appeared, he disappeared.
Poof Forbes wasn't sure what happened during these gin summonings

(28:23):
and admitted maybe she was just getting bamboozled, But she wrote, quote,
it would be an unprecedented insult to the name of
God that they invoked. Summoning a gin is just the
beginning of the relationship. However, I know it's not exactly

(28:45):
the easy part, but still consider what you'd face if
you managed to conjure them and then didn't know how
to control them. According to the Encyclopedia of Spirit Keeping,
Paranormal Collecting, and Magic, there's a simple invocation you need
to present to your gin once with you, which goes
like this, last the night, break the day, wake the sun,
wake the moon, all bindings through the cosmos. You are

(29:09):
unto me a spirit of my own. Keeping a master
to servant, so it is a friend to a friend,
and just like that, your gin will be bound to
you forever. Some other handy tips to keep things good
with your gin are these. Keep your gin or the
object that it's attached to within five ft of you
at all times. Keep lavender or are your scented candles

(29:31):
or insects burning as often as possible, because the gin
love those particular aromas. Meditate with your gin. Getting some
quiet time while it's just the two of you strengthens
the bonds. Preferably, you want to do this during the
hours of the day that the veil between the scene
and the unseen is the thinnest. They recommend between twelve
am and one am, three pm and four pm, or

(29:53):
seven pm to eight pm. But also chat with your gin,
especially around the early morning hours, just as dawn breaks.
That's when they're the most receptive to creating a rapport. Finally,
keep the gin in your thoughts because they can actually
hear them. Open up your life, your worries, your needs,
and your wants, all of it to your gin companion.

(30:15):
They're there for you. They want to hear it all
and be involved. Once you've conjured and bound your gin,
it's pretty much all yours and won't serve another master.
You might think this is too good to be true,
after all, don't the gin want something in return? Well,
some gin just like the attention, affirmation, and companionship. But
there is one gin in particular who demands the ultimate

(30:37):
price for making your wishes come true, your mortal soul.
And that jin, of course, is Satan. Now, there are
thousands of people who will willingly concede their souls to
Satan for lots of different reasons, and apparently it's not
even that tough to do. The Church of Satan, for example,
charges just two dollars for a lifetime membership, or rather,
I guess a lifetime plus afterlife membership. The ritual isn't

(31:00):
that complicated either, as one young man explained in a
two thousand and sixteen Slate article titled The Men who
Love to Worship Satan and Summon Demons. All you have
to do is write a letter, sign it in blood,
perform some kind of ritual, and then some physical marks
shows up on your body, like a scratch or a
burn or a welt, and that's it. Your wishes come true. Supposedly,

(31:23):
this particular young man, who the author decided to call Greg,
reported that during the ritual, a crack in the form
of an upside down cross showed up on the candle
that he was using, and he mysteriously ended up with
three scratches on his thigh. Then, after finishing the ritual,
Gregg laughed in a voice that wasn't his own. He had,
he said, given up his soul to the devil three

(31:45):
years earlier in the hopes for success in his career
with relationships and making money. The article goes on to
explore why young men turn to the occult. Maybe theorizes
the author as it's become more common for young women
to use crystals and paganism. Men are finding empowerment in
a more masculine, darker expression of the occult, like satanism

(32:06):
and summoning demons. But the article says what happens once
a demon is summoned is unclear. These men are often
seeking a connection they can draw strength and gain insight from,
but they do so taking the risk that once you're
summon a demon, you cannot close the connection. Some things
might be worth the risk, though the author of this

(32:27):
piece was prompted to write it when she got a
d M on a dating app from Gregg that read quote,
I've been thinking about summoning Satan to impress you. Yeah,
that same Gregg who had said he had sold his
soul to Satan for better luck with women, was still
three years later trying his luck on a dating app.
I can't help but think he might want to ask
for a refund. But look, we all have our priorities

(32:49):
and needs and wants. Many people who want to connect
with the supernatural, who are willing to summon gin no
matter the cost, are just kind of curious. Others are desperate.
Some are pregnant addict. Not long ago, Newsweek box On
reported the scientists employed at a research foundation proposed seriously
that summoning and subjectating jins could solve the country's energy

(33:10):
related problems because the creatures are made of fire. So yeah,
we all have our reasons, and I admit I actually
hope that they give this a shot. Whether or not
they do, or whether or not you do, the jin
may still come around unsummoned, because they say when you
speak about the gin, they come to hear what is said.

(33:31):
Who knows, maybe they're even listening to this podcast. Thanks
for joining us this week. Next week we'll be back
to take you another step into the world of the
Hidden Gin. Until then, remember we are not alone. If

(33:51):
you loved today's episode, I'm going to ask you a
big favor. Please stop my iTunes and leave me a
rating and a review, even if it's just one short sentence.
Not only is that how other listeners discover the podcast,
but it's also what keeps the podcast going. And for
every thousand reviews that I get on iTunes, I'll release
another Patreon episode absolutely free. That's right, We're on Patreon,

(34:14):
so if you're a Gin enthusiast, check out the Companion
Patreon series at patreon dot com slash Hidden Gin. Again,
that's patreon dot com slash Hidden Gin. And remember Jin
is spelled d j I n N. That's where you're
gonna find an amazing series of interviews between me, scholars, experts, artist, historians,
and every day lay people who have had extraordinary experiences

(34:38):
with Jin and everybody can check out the first episode
absolutely free. It's me and my husband sharing our gen
stories and it was a lot of fun. And if
you have any Gin stories, well, I'd love to hear
from you, email me at the Hidden Gin at gmail
dot com. Once again, it's the Hidden Gin Gin with
a D at gmail dot com and you might just

(34:59):
hear back from me, or you might hear your story
on this show. And finally, don't forget to follow us
on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with
the handle the Hidden Gin. There you can tweet, post
insta dm me. I'd love to hear from all of you,
and believe me, I read every single message. The Hidden

(35:22):
Gin is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The podcast is written and
hosted by Robbia Chaudry and produced by Miranda Hawkins and
Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and
Matt Frederick. Music for the show was provided by Smith
Sony and Folkways Recordings. Our theme song was created by

(35:45):
Patrick Cortez. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.