September 1, 2020 • 38 mins
The world of the djinn is ancient, but where did it all begin? This week's episode explores some of the earlier origin stories about where the djinn came from and exactly who and what they are.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkey. You're
(00:30):
here because you believe in more than the I can see.
What you believe in may be different than what someone
else believes in. Some of you might believe in ghosts,
others may believe in angels, and yet others believe in
fairies and trolls and lepre cons. But I'm pretty sure
all of you believe in something supernatural, intangible, something that
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exists in the shadows of our everyday human experience. And
just like you, millions of others throughout history and throughout
the world have believed with religious fervor in a supernatural
being you may never have heard of, but caricatures of
that creature have still managed to crack through our pop culture.
And chances are that at some point in your childhood
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you rubbed a lamp and made a wish, hoping that
the blue Genie from the film Aladdin would pop out
and grant your wildest desires. You know, the funny, wise
cracking genie dressed in a confusing mix of Middle Eastern
and South Asian clothing, singing and tap dancing a pretty
endearing creature all around to children and adults alike. But
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what you may not know is that there is nothing
childish about genies, and that the silly, grinning, innocuous apparition
from the Disney adaptations couldn't be further from the truth
when it comes to the centuries of tradition, folklore, and
fervent belief in an entire race of powerful and often
terrifying beings. The gin, that's right, our happy blue friend
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from Aladdin, is a gin, a gin from the Arabian
tale One thousand and one. Night and the gin are
nothing to laugh about. I'm Robbia Chaudhry, and I'll be
your guide into the ancient world of the hidden Gin.
Welcome and the gen We created a four time from
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the smokeless fire of a scorching wind. These words may
sound like they come from a modern paranormal young adult novel,
but they're actually almost fift years old, and they come
from the Muslim scripture, Chapter fifteen, verse of the Koran.
We create a four time from the smokeless fire of
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a scorching wind. The WII. Here is God himself explaining
the differences of his creation. Two believers mere mortals, says
God he created out of a muddy clay, and angels
he fashioned out of pure light. And then there's this
third category of creation, the gin. God created them fearsome
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from the smokeless flame of a scorching wind, the very
edge of the flame, indeed the most essential, purest part
of it, given the description, if you think about it,
the gin are composed of kind of the opposite elements
of us humans. We're mostly water and carbon material like
the Earth itself, while ginn are created from the air
elements of fire and wind like the Earth. Human beings
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are tangible material, fixed and limited in our physical manifestations,
but gin like living gusts of fiery wind. They are ineffable, powerful,
and uncontained. Now, scholars say that this description of gin
indicates a brilliant flame of the highest intensity mixed with
a smoldering wind. But it also signifies that maybe the
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gin and are made from the howling flames of Hell itself.
They're very composition, smolders and burns, and yet it gives
off no smoke. Now, this may seem counterintuitive and contrary
to everything we think we know about fires, but believe
it or not, smokeless flames are completely ordinary. In fact,
you can find dozens of video tutorials online on how
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to create your very own smokeless fire, but good luck
turning those into gin. Not everyone thinks the smokeless flame
description is literal, though. Like many things in all scriptures,
there are urns of phrases, figurative passages meant to present
the contours of an idea and language understandable for the
time period. Think about it this way. Human beings aren't
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actually made of clay, but we are made of organic compounds,
earthly elements, tangible materials, ashes to ashes, and dusted us
and science even tells us that we are made of stardust,
so you get the drift. Likewise, say some scholars, maybe
the term smoke was flame of a scorching wind actually
signifies energy. That maybe the gin or pure energy and
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the exist across dimensions that we don't even know exist.
They're able to transform transport, untethered by the laws of
physics that bind humans, flitting back and forth through planes
of time and space, unseen to our eyes, which is
why they're called gin, a word that means hidden, unable
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to be detected by human senses, concealed from all of us.
But even though we can't see them, just like energy,
they're everywhere around us. Maybe they're made of a combination
of the many different kinds of energies we know exist,
or maybe their elements involved energy sources we haven't even
yet discovered, and maybe we never will. Maybe they're like
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the energy life force that many religions, faith traditions, and
even indigenous cultures believe is contained within our very own bodies.
You know, those things we called souls. Now, if you're
a believer, it doesn't really matter what the ginner made of.
You just know they're out there and here, right here,
right next to me and next to you. We can't
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see them, but they can see you. And if you're
not a believer, then maybe by the time the series
is over, you will be. Look, if I'm going to
be honest, no three Muslims can get together without swapping
jin stories. It's our parallel tradition to time honored campfire
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ghost stories. We just can't help ourselves because well, we
all have jin stories to tell. But make no mistake,
Jin stories didn't start in the seventh century in the
desert of Arabia with the advent of the Muslim religion.
Even though they're mentioned forty times in the scripture the Koran,
the Gin are much more ancient than that, predating the
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Koronic Scripture by centuries, and their tales stretch across continents
and millennia. After all, God say that he created them aforetime,
So when did it all begin? There isn't exactly one
answer to that question that we can be sure is correct,
and that's likely because dozens of different traditions and folklore
merged over time and regions, intermingling and criss crossing like
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a spider's web to create an entire universe of tales.
There are echoes of the Arabian Gin stories familiar strains
in the spirit myths from primitive Assyria and Babylonia. Gin
deities were all the Rage and Palmira in ancient Syria,
and historians believe these demigods were called Gene, which in
fact means invisible in Aramaic. But not all these ancient
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creatures were worshiped as gods. The Babylonians themselves were steeped
in magical practices and demon lore, with a vast array
of demonic entities that parallel Jin descriptions like the Atuku,
a malevolent spirit that dwelled in deserts and graveyards, abandoned
desolate spaces, lying wait for unsuspecting humans passing by. There's
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also the Rabis, who which hide in barren spots and
spring out to attack those that cross its paths. Both
of these creatures sound like and operate exactly like a
kind of gin called the ghoul. You'll also find in
the corpus of Jewish demonology, and yes, that's a thing,
mentions of evil spirits that sound an awful lot like
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the gin's that we encounter in Arabian lore. An ancient
Arabic translation of the Book of Job from the Hebrew
Bible even suggests the Queen of Sheba was a Jin,
birth from the union of a human and a demon.
There are dozens and dozens of rabbit holes you can
fall into as you try to trace the origins of
Gin lore, but for now we'll stay out of them,
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and we'll focus on the vast body of tales that
arose over centuries from late antiquity onwards from the sands
of the Middle East. If you're thinking jin are basically ghosts,
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at least as ghosts are understood in the Western imagination.
Well you're not even close. In fact, that gin are
much more like human beings than haunting, shadowy spirits. The
gin are born, they eat and drink, they work and
conduct business, They fall in love, they marry and have children,
and yes, that means they are sexually active. They live
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in communities, and they have hierarchies, nations and kingdoms. They
may profess a religion. They are good and they are evil,
And just as they live, they die, not for thousands
of years, but eventually they do die. And they have
what we would consider superpowers, including the power of shape shifting,
super strength, traveling through the cosmos and different dimensions, and
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all the many kinds of things human beings often wished
we were capable of. While there isn't much in scriptural
sources that describes the original creation of the jin, there
are many origin stories found in medieval writings, ancient folklore,
and that differ from place to place. According to one legend,
the very first gin that God created out of the
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blazing desert wind well before the creation of mankind, was
a gin named assume Bin John Tarnushi. His progeny inherited
the earth, ruling over it for thousands of years and
giving rise to seventy two jinn kings. The last of
these kings was named John Iven John, from where the
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name for the entire species of gin comes from. It
would be tens of thousands of years later that human
beings came into existence and took over with the jinns
once ruled. Another origin stories ties the origin of the
gin very closely to that of man. According to this legend, Eve,
the wife of Adam, gave birth to forty children at
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the same time. We can only care for half of them.
Without telling Adams, she discarded twenty of the children, and
then she lied to her husband that her brood was
only the remaining twenty. But Adam had a suspicion, so
he said a prayer to God, asking that his lost
children be allowed to live beneath the earth and only
venture out at night when the rest of mankind slept.
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These twenty subterranean dwellers became the Gin. The male of
Southeast Asia believed that the gin arose from three leaves
of the mangrove tree. Green gin emerged from a leaf
that flew into the sky. The black gin emerged from
a leaf that fell at a dark forest gate, and
white gin from a leaf that ended up in the ocean.
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And yet one more origin story can be found in
a sprawling tenth century book called The Meadows of Gold
and Minds of Gems, written by a scholar named al Masoudi.
The book itself is a tome on the very history
of time and the world and all of creation in it,
so naturally it couldn't leave out the gin. According to Almosudi,
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God created the first gin, a male from burning wind,
and from that gin, God created a mate. Not unlike
the Adam and Eve story, these two came together and
their union resulted in thirty eggs. Each of these thirty eggs,
upon hatching, released a different kind of gin. One of
the eggs cracked open and out emerged the mother of
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all the kotwebs, the gin that come in the form
of cat. From another egg emerged the Blazes, the demon gin,
which make their home within the walls. From another egg
where hatched the maradas, which inhabit islands. Another egg produced
the ghoul. And yes, if that sounds like the kind
of ghoule you're familiar with, that's because it's one of
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the same thing, And yet from another egg emerged the silas,
which hide in the mountains, and yet others the Wahawe's,
which inhabit the air in the form of winged serpents,
and so on and so forth. Each of the third
the eggs cracked open, revealing a variant species of Gin. Now,
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some of these descriptions may sound familiar to you, and
they should. Gin in the form of cats, well, that's
not so far removed from shape shifting, which companions the
feline familiar winged serpent gins that fly through the air,
Hello dragons, and the earliest known story about lepre cons
involves a captured group of them granting three wishes to
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their captor to gain their release. Granting wishes and playing
tricks on humans seems to be a crossover favorite for
both the Gin and these Celtic creatures. Some even argue
that fairies, those tiny, adorable, sparkly flitting creatures we've come
to associate with glitter and enchantment, actually have a dark
history that ties neatly with Gin lore, or at least
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there are some interesting parallels they're worth considering. For example,
according to the lore, both the gin and fairies predate
human creation. They're both creatures that took up their abode
in the earth, but eventually withdrew into a world where
they could be invisible. They both loved to play tricks
on human beings, they live extraordinarily long lives, and most interestingly,
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they might have a very similar origin story. According to
the Celtic lore, fairies are none other than fallen angels,
having followed Lucifer out of heaven when he rebelled against God.
According to a nineteenth century account by folklorist Alexander Carmichael,
local Irish storytellers relayed this tale of the fallen fairies
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quote doomed to live under the ground and only permitted
to emerge when and where the King permits, these cursed
fairies weren't allowed out of their hiding places on certain days,
but on some nights they would light their lamps and sing,
not of the seed of Adam are we, and Abraham
is not our father, but of the seed of the
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proud Angel driven forth from heaven. Likewise, in a Muslim tradition,
the rebellious gin also were cast out of heaven following
their master Lucifer. Given some of the overlap in the lore,
maybe fairies and leprecrons are manifestations of gin. If you
were to ask some folks, actually, they'd say, all supernatural
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beings and phenomena are some form of Gin or another,
whether those beings are playful and harmless or their destructive
and evil UFO sightings. Gin, human possessions, Jin, crop circles.
Gin magician David Blaine, Oh, definitely a gin, and believe
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it or not. According to a two thousand six report
in The Economist, factions in Somalia and Ifhanistan have accused
their enemies of being backed not only by the CIA,
but by malevolent gin. One theory in if Ahanistan holds
that the Mujahideen scared the Gin out into the world,
causing disharmony. It is the Gin, they say, who whisper
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into the ears of suicide bombers. So while it's seems
that there are some people who see gin everywhere and
in everything, scholars and enthusiasts have categorized the Gin into
four broad categories, and each of these four kinds will
once again sound pretty familiar to you. First, there are
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the Gin who live among humans, the ones who inhabit
our homes right alongside with us, which are called the omar.
After all, we have all heard about house hauntings. Countless
books and films have been made about supernatural dwellers, often
evil and violent, that really want their space to themselves.
These beings do everything in their power to get rid
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of whatever hapless family unwittingly moved into their territory. But
unlike what Hollywood would have you believe, not all of
our co inhabitants are violent psychopaths. Most of the time,
they just want to live right alongside with you in
their own parallel plane without even letting you know that
they are. Other times, however, they may like to mess
with you or just let you know that they're in charge.
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In two thousand nine, a Saudi family was so fed
up with being harassed by gin in their house they
finally took the gin to court. You heard me right,
They sued the unseen entity in an actual court of law.
The lawsuit filed by the family, which was joined by
every member of the family, alleged that the Jin had
for the previous two years, stolen their cell phones, left
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them threatening voicemails maybe from those very same cell phones,
helded them with rocks every time they left the house
at night and frightened the children. They heard voices, first
a woman's voice, that a man's telling them to get
out of the house, and whispering threats. Now, the court
took the matter seriously because it wasn't like it was
just one person making the allegations. It was the entire family,
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So they investigated, but of course they found it wasn't
easy to substantiate the charges. Many different media was reported
the case, which seems to suggest it was unusual enough
to make the news, although it would be great fun
to exclusively have a jin docket. Anyway, there isn't any
information out there about the court's ultimate verdict, and the
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lawyer in me can't help but wonder what damages the
family was asking for. Do they want their cell phones back,
an apology for the voicemails and exorcism. Well, what we
do know is the family eventually just moved out, So
I guess you could say the defendant one. Then there
are the kind of gin that terrify every living parent
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on earth. If you've ever raised some little ones, at
some point you may have seen your child communicating with
something or someone invisible to you, but not invisible to
your child. We've all seen that spooky black and white
child monitor video footage where some toddler in a crib
is deep in conversation, babbling, laughing, pointing, responding to what
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looks like nothing there at all. It could be that
the child is in fact having a chat with an arwa,
the kind of gin that just love babies. You could
call them baby whisperers. These gin attacks themselves to small
children many times. It's not out of any malice, but
because they're kind of baby crazy. They love the coops
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and gurgles and innocent wonder as much as we do.
Maybe they even love that fresh baby powder and mixed
with warm milk smell. Some of them can't stand it
if someone is mean to a child. They are there
to play with and protect their tiny friends. That doesn't
mean there aren't others that love to torment children, but
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most just take advantage of the fact that the children
are more receptive to them. Unlike adults. The veil between
the scene and the unseen is thinner for little ones,
and it's believed that both animals and children are able
to see gin and communicate with them easily. A two
thousand six article titled of children. Engin in the Journal
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of Cultural Anthropology chronicled just such a situation. The author,
a researcher staying at the home of her professor, was
shocked to learn that his family had for years lived
with multiple gin in their home. The gin had apparently
been gifted to them by an acquaintance, if we could
call that a gift, an acquaintance who inherited them from
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his own father. But the acquaintance apparently had too many
jin to know what to do with, so he sent
a group of his gin companions to the home of
his friend, the professor, gifting him one jin for every
male member of the family. But the jin didn't communicate
with the family through the male members that they had
been assigned to. Instead, their main conduit was the eight
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year old daughter of the family, Mariam. Mariam was the
only member of the family who could see the jin,
see them actually interspersed with her family, hanging out and
about with them. She could read with a jin desired
in the palms of her hands, and when family members
had questions or needed advice from the gin, little muddy
Um was the one to pass on the message. Once
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a gin told muddy Um he really wanted to experience
what human food tasted like. She told her father, the Professor,
and with his permission, she told the jin to go
ahead and enter her father's body to find out. And
so apparently that's exactly what the gin did. The Professor
was suddenly seized with an uncontrollable appetite, and he ate
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and ate and ate until the household ran out of food.
The gin that muddy Um and her family felt closest
to was named Soleiman. He was thousands of years old,
older even than Christianity, and muddy Um described him as
tall with the long white beard, and he wore clean,
spotless white clothing. While he was usually serious, he was
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very gentle, especially with muddy Um. The child was never
frightened by him. For years, the family itself never interacted
with the gin except through muddy Um, and in effect,
this female child commanded a great deal of power over
them in a time and place where female children might
not otherwise. Eventually, Muddyum lost her ability as childhood gave
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away to puberty. The family tried to get her younger sister, Fatima,
to take her place, but Fatima was not as willing
a medium as muddy Um. She was scared of the gin,
and also upset that they did not seem to be
doing her bidding. Eventually, the family just kind of gave
the gin back to their acquaintance who had gifted it
to them in the first place. They're lucky that the
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parting was amicable, because it isn't always like that, which
brings us to the third broad category of gin, which
all kind of fall within a spectrum of well evil.
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The least powerful of all the evil gin are the Shyadine,
and if you think that word sounds familiar, it should
because it's Arabic for a bunch of Satan's. The Shayatine
keep busy inspiring mankind to do evil deeds through whisperers
and black thoughts. Then there are the marid, which are
powerful gin that can be summoned by black magic, who
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only do the opposite of what they're commanded, and who
are related to water elements living around lakes, waterfalls, rivers,
oceans I think mermaids, but really terrifying ones. Finally, there
are the Ifrit, known to be the largest, fastest, strongest,
coming in all shapes and sizes and abilities, and the
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most evil of them all. You could even call them demons,
and some say that the angry, vengeful spirits of those
who died violent unnatural debts could also be a free.
You might be surprised to know that the happy dancing
genie in a bottle that comes from the Arabian tail
in One thousand and one Nights is in fact, and
a free and a freath have made their way into
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other modern Western pop culture, and a freak character makes
an appearance in both the television series True Blood and
the blockbuster Neil game and novel American Gods. And if
you're a gamer, you might know that you can summon
an a freat in the Final Fantasy video game. These
blips of publicity notwithstanding, undeniably, the most infamous account of
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the freet is thousands of years old, and it's the
story of the gin that were believed to be enslaved
by the great Biblical King Solomon. That's right. One of
the many divine abilities granted to the legendary King Solomon
was a power to control the jin. According to the
Muslim tradition, it was through this power that Solomon was
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able to become one of the most powerful rulers the
world has ever seen. King Solomon commanded the legions of
Gin to do his bidding, sending Jin armies to fight
off his enemies and using Gin labor to build never
before seen architectural marvels like the First Temple of Jerusalem.
In fact, the city of Jerusalem itself, along with its
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ancient walls, is said to be built by Solomon's Jin slaves.
There are rabbinical interpretations that say that the massive stones
that built the temple cried out with actual voices and
moved themselves to the construction site. Other stories say that
the female Jin mined the great stones from quarries and
carried them to the sacred site, accounting for the appearance
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of the stones moving by themselves. There are Hebrew rabbinical
commentaries about Ecclesiastes to eight, in which Solomon himself describes
how he collected quote a shidda vestidote, a phrase meaning demons.
Another ancient text further described Solomon's enslavement of supernatural beings
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to carry out his will. That text is called the
Testament of Solomon and it dates from around two This
magical text, which is leave to have its origins in
the first century, is in fact ascribed to King Solomon himself.
While it's not considered a biblical canon, it is supposedly
a first hand account of the building of the First Temple,
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though there is disagreement as to his authorship, which can
of course certainly be expected of a two thousand year
old document. Now, according to the story, the master workman
at the temple's construction site had a young son who
King Solomon was quite fond of. The son, like his father,
worked and earned wages, but over time, the child grew
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thinner and thinner and weaker would every passing day. It
turned out a vampiric jin named Orneus had been creeping
into the worker's camp every night, stealing the boy's food
and wages, and sucking the child's life energy, his blood,
in other words, right out of the boys right thumb.
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When Solomon learned of this, he prayed and prayed that
God would give him the power to deal with Orneus.
One day, that prayer was aswered when, according to Solomon's Testament,
the archangel Michael brought him a powerful ring forged out
of iron and copper, so bright and shiny that Solomon
could hardly look at it. The ring was engraved with
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two interlocking triangles, creating a hexagram, and within the hexagram
was the tech a grammaton the four letters symbolizing the
most powerful name of God. The engraving on this ring
has come to be known as the famed Seal of Solomon.
The ring allowed Solomon to control all the gin in
this world and in every dimension, and the Testament of
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Solomon actually lists many of the gin, at least the
notable ones that King Solomon summoned to appear before him
to account for their deeds and to be sentenced accordingly.
One of the gin that Solomon commanded before him was
a no nosculis, whose form was half woman and half mule.
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She told Solomon she was born from the voice of
the go of a black heaven, emitted in matter. She
dwelled in caves and jungles, and she seduced and strangled
men for her sins. Solomon sentence a Noscelis to make
hemp ropes for the construction of the Temple day and night.
Another Jin that the ring dragged before Solomon with Ashmadai,
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one of the most powerful Jin. The story of Ashmada's
humiliation in front of Solomon doesn't only appear in the
Testament of Solomon. It also appears in the Babylonian Talmud,
a Hebrew text of collected documents between the third and
six centuries, a couple of hundred years after the Testament,
and this Talmud tells a similar tale of King Solomon
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enslaving Ashmadi to build the temple. But Ashmadi wasn't any
old demon. He was called the King of Demons, and
Renaissance Christians called Ashmadi the King of nine Hells, the
demon prince of the deadly sin of lust, so clearly
he had a long standing and terrifying reputation. Ashmadi told
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King Solomon that he was the offspring of an angel
and a human woman. For those of you familiar with
the Old Testament, you might recall the story in the
Book of Enoch about the Watchers, or the Sons of
God as they were called angels, who disobeyed God's command,
descended to Earth to take earthly wives, and then bore
beastly offspring, called the Nephelim. Maybe that's what ashman I
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was claiming to be one of the Nephelum. Nonetheless, ashman
I specialties included driving people to insanity, causing them to
commit murder, interfering in marriages, and causing enmity between people.
For these sins, Solomon sent us, the demon king, to
be weakened by iron, a metal that Jin are terrified
of because it causes them pain and harm, and to
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make clay for the temple by trampling the ground. Now
you may be thinking, well, was it Gin or demons
that King Solomon controlled? But the answer is both, because,
as we said before, the universe of Gin includes the
most evil of them, better known as demons, and yes,
even Satan himself. But more on Satan later in the series,
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because believe me, you can't talk about Jin without talking
about Satan. Back to Solomon, though the enslavement of scores
of Gin apparently rubbed many of them the wrong way,
Ashmad I raised an immortal battle cry against all mankind, declaring,
and your tyranny will be short over us, and then
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we will again have free range over mankind, so as
that they will regard us as if we were gods,
not knowing men that they are the names of the
angels set over us. And so to this day there
remains a legion of Gin who are still peeved off
at the indignities that they suffered on the Solomon, because remember,
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they lived for thousands of years. You see, Solomon didn't
just enslave of scores of them. Others he imprisoned in
brass and iron vessels sealed with a magical spell. Yet
others were locked up for eternity and rings made of
precious gems guarded by powerful talisman. For all we know,
these many Gin, the hundreds of thousands or millions of them,
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are still locked up to this day. And back then
it became pretty clear to the Gin that no good
could come from men having control of them. We don't
know about the Gin imprisoned in vessels and rings with
the Jin enslaved by King Solomon were finally released when he,
according to the Testament, failed a test of faith by God.
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The ring that he used to control his Gin slaves
and Jin army was in fact stolen by a Jin
who morphed himself into a Solomon look like and ruled
for forty days pretending to be the king. In some traditions,
it said that King Solomon regained the ring and continued
to lord over his hordes of Gin, but one day,
as he stood leaning on his staff, watching the Jin
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slaves work and build his many projects in the Holy Land.
He quietly died, but no one realized it because he
was standing holding onto the staff. He didn't topple over,
even though he was very much dead. His body continued
to stay upright leaning on the staff, and no one
realized he died. So the Jin continued to slave away,
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thinking that their master was still watching them. Finally, though,
the staff was eaten through by worms, and the mighty
King Solomon finally fell to the earth, alerting his slaves
that the king was no more and that their years
of humiliation and forced labor had ended. A Jin traveled
far and wide to the outer reaches of Solomon's kingdom
(32:46):
to tell the others, shake the dust of your labor
and go your way, and so they did, gaining their
freedom at last. No one since King Solomon has ever
been able to have command over the higher creation of Gin,
likely because the ring that held that power disappeared. Legend
(33:07):
has it that Solomon's ring, sword, and crown are buried
on an island in a lake, and see what Egypt.
No one, however, has ever found these treasures, and another
legend says that they will not re emerge until the
end times when the great apocalyptic Beast appears, who will
be wielding both Solomon's staff and his seal. But until then,
(33:35):
there are still ways for human beings to get jin
to do their bidding, because there are always jin who
are willing to well negotiate their powers with us mere mortals.
So yes, there are ways if you want a gin
at your beck and call to get one, But more
on that in a later episode. For now, we move
on to the final category of gin, the ones that
(33:58):
we are born and die with. The Karen are constant companions.
According to the tradition, each one of us is born
with a Karen, which literally means constant companion, a jin
assigned to us at birth that lives with us throughout
our lives and dies with us when we die. At
(34:18):
least that's the most common understanding of what the Karen are.
This Jin, like others, has commonalities with much more ancient beings.
The Babylonians believed in a demon called the Cid, which,
while having evil properties, was also a guardian spirit attached
to human beings, much like the Assyrian deity Lamassu, also
a protective creature. Then there is the Christian Guardian Angel,
(34:42):
a more familiar being to our understanding. The point of
departure is this, though not all scholars believe the Karen
are necessarily protective. In fact, many believe the Karen are
evil jin, meant to confuse and lead man astray at
every turn from the moment of his birth until his death,
kind of like a little devil on your shoulder, would
bring you into things you know you shouldn't be doing.
(35:06):
And others believe that the karn is a person's double
or even a familiar. Now, you might be most familiar
with the familiar as an animal companion to say which,
but historically the understanding of a familiar was much more broad.
Philosopher Pierre Refard defined a familiar as possibly being a
double ganger or a totem spirit, or perhaps even a
(35:29):
personal demon. In some traditions, it's said that because the
Jin are created with free will, the kren to chose
what they want to do of their own free accord,
but they can be brought under the control of their
human through various spiritual rituals and black magic. One way
they say, to weaken the grip your kren has over
you is basically to just be a good person. It
(35:52):
said that the more evil a person engages in, the
more powerful his karine becomes, pushing him or her to
worse and worse acts. After all, the beast you feed
is the one that will win. What makes a green
particularly insidious to human beings, maybe more so than any
other gin, is the fact that they've been with you
(36:12):
since the day you were born, so they know everything
about you. They've witnessed everything you've ever done or said.
They know your deepest desires, your weaknesses, your secrets, which
means if they wanted, they could manipulate you like a
puppet master. So it seems like your best bet is
too well, just keep your careen on your good side,
(36:33):
because we're better or worse, this is one companion you'll
never be able to shake. Thanks for joining us this week.
Next week we'll be back to take you on another
step into the world of the Hidden Gin. Until then,
remember we are not alone. If you have a GIN story,
(36:57):
drop us a line at the Hidden jin in at
gmail dot com and remember that's Gin with the D,
D J, I N N, and tell us all about
it along with your contact information. You never know you
might hear back from me, and if you're a GIN enthusiast,
you can get more gin content on our Patreon page,
where I'll be dropping full length interviews with GIN experts
(37:18):
and scholars, as well as conversations with people who have
had firsthand GIN experiences. So check it out at patreon
dot com slash Hidden Gin. Finally, don't forget to follow
us on social media. You can find us both on
Twitter and Facebook with the handle at the Hidden Gin.
The Hidden Gin is a production of I Heart Radio
(37:40):
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
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(38:02):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
M Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkey. You're
(00:30):
here because you believe in more than the I can see.
What you believe in may be different than what someone
else believes in. Some of you might believe in ghosts,
others may believe in angels, and yet others believe in
fairies and trolls and lepre cons. But I'm pretty sure
all of you believe in something supernatural, intangible, something that
(00:53):
exists in the shadows of our everyday human experience. And
just like you, millions of others throughout history and throughout
the world have believed with religious fervor in a supernatural
being you may never have heard of, but caricatures of
that creature have still managed to crack through our pop culture.
And chances are that at some point in your childhood
(01:16):
you rubbed a lamp and made a wish, hoping that
the blue Genie from the film Aladdin would pop out
and grant your wildest desires. You know, the funny, wise
cracking genie dressed in a confusing mix of Middle Eastern
and South Asian clothing, singing and tap dancing a pretty
endearing creature all around to children and adults alike. But
(01:38):
what you may not know is that there is nothing
childish about genies, and that the silly, grinning, innocuous apparition
from the Disney adaptations couldn't be further from the truth
when it comes to the centuries of tradition, folklore, and
fervent belief in an entire race of powerful and often
terrifying beings. The gin, that's right, our happy blue friend
(02:03):
from Aladdin, is a gin, a gin from the Arabian
tale One thousand and one. Night and the gin are
nothing to laugh about. I'm Robbia Chaudhry, and I'll be
your guide into the ancient world of the hidden Gin.
Welcome and the gen We created a four time from
(02:29):
the smokeless fire of a scorching wind. These words may
sound like they come from a modern paranormal young adult novel,
but they're actually almost fift years old, and they come
from the Muslim scripture, Chapter fifteen, verse of the Koran.
We create a four time from the smokeless fire of
(02:51):
a scorching wind. The WII. Here is God himself explaining
the differences of his creation. Two believers mere mortals, says
God he created out of a muddy clay, and angels
he fashioned out of pure light. And then there's this
third category of creation, the gin. God created them fearsome
(03:12):
from the smokeless flame of a scorching wind, the very
edge of the flame, indeed the most essential, purest part
of it, given the description, if you think about it,
the gin are composed of kind of the opposite elements
of us humans. We're mostly water and carbon material like
the Earth itself, while ginn are created from the air
elements of fire and wind like the Earth. Human beings
(03:36):
are tangible material, fixed and limited in our physical manifestations,
but gin like living gusts of fiery wind. They are ineffable, powerful,
and uncontained. Now, scholars say that this description of gin
indicates a brilliant flame of the highest intensity mixed with
a smoldering wind. But it also signifies that maybe the
(03:59):
gin and are made from the howling flames of Hell itself.
They're very composition, smolders and burns, and yet it gives
off no smoke. Now, this may seem counterintuitive and contrary
to everything we think we know about fires, but believe
it or not, smokeless flames are completely ordinary. In fact,
you can find dozens of video tutorials online on how
(04:21):
to create your very own smokeless fire, but good luck
turning those into gin. Not everyone thinks the smokeless flame
description is literal, though. Like many things in all scriptures,
there are urns of phrases, figurative passages meant to present
the contours of an idea and language understandable for the
time period. Think about it this way. Human beings aren't
(04:43):
actually made of clay, but we are made of organic compounds,
earthly elements, tangible materials, ashes to ashes, and dusted us
and science even tells us that we are made of stardust,
so you get the drift. Likewise, say some scholars, maybe
the term smoke was flame of a scorching wind actually
signifies energy. That maybe the gin or pure energy and
(05:06):
the exist across dimensions that we don't even know exist.
They're able to transform transport, untethered by the laws of
physics that bind humans, flitting back and forth through planes
of time and space, unseen to our eyes, which is
why they're called gin, a word that means hidden, unable
(05:27):
to be detected by human senses, concealed from all of us.
But even though we can't see them, just like energy,
they're everywhere around us. Maybe they're made of a combination
of the many different kinds of energies we know exist,
or maybe their elements involved energy sources we haven't even
yet discovered, and maybe we never will. Maybe they're like
(05:49):
the energy life force that many religions, faith traditions, and
even indigenous cultures believe is contained within our very own bodies.
You know, those things we called souls. Now, if you're
a believer, it doesn't really matter what the ginner made of.
You just know they're out there and here, right here,
right next to me and next to you. We can't
(06:10):
see them, but they can see you. And if you're
not a believer, then maybe by the time the series
is over, you will be. Look, if I'm going to
be honest, no three Muslims can get together without swapping
jin stories. It's our parallel tradition to time honored campfire
(06:31):
ghost stories. We just can't help ourselves because well, we
all have jin stories to tell. But make no mistake,
Jin stories didn't start in the seventh century in the
desert of Arabia with the advent of the Muslim religion.
Even though they're mentioned forty times in the scripture the Koran,
the Gin are much more ancient than that, predating the
(06:52):
Koronic Scripture by centuries, and their tales stretch across continents
and millennia. After all, God say that he created them aforetime,
So when did it all begin? There isn't exactly one
answer to that question that we can be sure is correct,
and that's likely because dozens of different traditions and folklore
merged over time and regions, intermingling and criss crossing like
(07:16):
a spider's web to create an entire universe of tales.
There are echoes of the Arabian Gin stories familiar strains
in the spirit myths from primitive Assyria and Babylonia. Gin
deities were all the Rage and Palmira in ancient Syria,
and historians believe these demigods were called Gene, which in
fact means invisible in Aramaic. But not all these ancient
(07:40):
creatures were worshiped as gods. The Babylonians themselves were steeped
in magical practices and demon lore, with a vast array
of demonic entities that parallel Jin descriptions like the Atuku,
a malevolent spirit that dwelled in deserts and graveyards, abandoned
desolate spaces, lying wait for unsuspecting humans passing by. There's
(08:03):
also the Rabis, who which hide in barren spots and
spring out to attack those that cross its paths. Both
of these creatures sound like and operate exactly like a
kind of gin called the ghoul. You'll also find in
the corpus of Jewish demonology, and yes, that's a thing,
mentions of evil spirits that sound an awful lot like
(08:24):
the gin's that we encounter in Arabian lore. An ancient
Arabic translation of the Book of Job from the Hebrew
Bible even suggests the Queen of Sheba was a Jin,
birth from the union of a human and a demon.
There are dozens and dozens of rabbit holes you can
fall into as you try to trace the origins of
Gin lore, but for now we'll stay out of them,
(08:45):
and we'll focus on the vast body of tales that
arose over centuries from late antiquity onwards from the sands
of the Middle East. If you're thinking jin are basically ghosts,
(09:11):
at least as ghosts are understood in the Western imagination.
Well you're not even close. In fact, that gin are
much more like human beings than haunting, shadowy spirits. The
gin are born, they eat and drink, they work and
conduct business, They fall in love, they marry and have children,
and yes, that means they are sexually active. They live
(09:32):
in communities, and they have hierarchies, nations and kingdoms. They
may profess a religion. They are good and they are evil,
And just as they live, they die, not for thousands
of years, but eventually they do die. And they have
what we would consider superpowers, including the power of shape shifting,
super strength, traveling through the cosmos and different dimensions, and
(09:55):
all the many kinds of things human beings often wished
we were capable of. While there isn't much in scriptural
sources that describes the original creation of the jin, there
are many origin stories found in medieval writings, ancient folklore,
and that differ from place to place. According to one legend,
the very first gin that God created out of the
(10:16):
blazing desert wind well before the creation of mankind, was
a gin named assume Bin John Tarnushi. His progeny inherited
the earth, ruling over it for thousands of years and
giving rise to seventy two jinn kings. The last of
these kings was named John Iven John, from where the
(10:37):
name for the entire species of gin comes from. It
would be tens of thousands of years later that human
beings came into existence and took over with the jinns
once ruled. Another origin stories ties the origin of the
gin very closely to that of man. According to this legend, Eve,
the wife of Adam, gave birth to forty children at
(10:59):
the same time. We can only care for half of them.
Without telling Adams, she discarded twenty of the children, and
then she lied to her husband that her brood was
only the remaining twenty. But Adam had a suspicion, so
he said a prayer to God, asking that his lost
children be allowed to live beneath the earth and only
venture out at night when the rest of mankind slept.
(11:22):
These twenty subterranean dwellers became the Gin. The male of
Southeast Asia believed that the gin arose from three leaves
of the mangrove tree. Green gin emerged from a leaf
that flew into the sky. The black gin emerged from
a leaf that fell at a dark forest gate, and
white gin from a leaf that ended up in the ocean.
(11:43):
And yet one more origin story can be found in
a sprawling tenth century book called The Meadows of Gold
and Minds of Gems, written by a scholar named al Masoudi.
The book itself is a tome on the very history
of time and the world and all of creation in it,
so naturally it couldn't leave out the gin. According to Almosudi,
(12:05):
God created the first gin, a male from burning wind,
and from that gin, God created a mate. Not unlike
the Adam and Eve story, these two came together and
their union resulted in thirty eggs. Each of these thirty eggs,
upon hatching, released a different kind of gin. One of
the eggs cracked open and out emerged the mother of
(12:26):
all the kotwebs, the gin that come in the form
of cat. From another egg emerged the Blazes, the demon gin,
which make their home within the walls. From another egg
where hatched the maradas, which inhabit islands. Another egg produced
the ghoul. And yes, if that sounds like the kind
of ghoule you're familiar with, that's because it's one of
(12:46):
the same thing, And yet from another egg emerged the silas,
which hide in the mountains, and yet others the Wahawe's,
which inhabit the air in the form of winged serpents,
and so on and so forth. Each of the third
the eggs cracked open, revealing a variant species of Gin. Now,
(13:07):
some of these descriptions may sound familiar to you, and
they should. Gin in the form of cats, well, that's
not so far removed from shape shifting, which companions the
feline familiar winged serpent gins that fly through the air,
Hello dragons, and the earliest known story about lepre cons
involves a captured group of them granting three wishes to
(13:29):
their captor to gain their release. Granting wishes and playing
tricks on humans seems to be a crossover favorite for
both the Gin and these Celtic creatures. Some even argue
that fairies, those tiny, adorable, sparkly flitting creatures we've come
to associate with glitter and enchantment, actually have a dark
history that ties neatly with Gin lore, or at least
(13:51):
there are some interesting parallels they're worth considering. For example,
according to the lore, both the gin and fairies predate
human creation. They're both creatures that took up their abode
in the earth, but eventually withdrew into a world where
they could be invisible. They both loved to play tricks
on human beings, they live extraordinarily long lives, and most interestingly,
(14:12):
they might have a very similar origin story. According to
the Celtic lore, fairies are none other than fallen angels,
having followed Lucifer out of heaven when he rebelled against God.
According to a nineteenth century account by folklorist Alexander Carmichael,
local Irish storytellers relayed this tale of the fallen fairies
(14:33):
quote doomed to live under the ground and only permitted
to emerge when and where the King permits, these cursed
fairies weren't allowed out of their hiding places on certain days,
but on some nights they would light their lamps and sing,
not of the seed of Adam are we, and Abraham
is not our father, but of the seed of the
(14:54):
proud Angel driven forth from heaven. Likewise, in a Muslim tradition,
the rebellious gin also were cast out of heaven following
their master Lucifer. Given some of the overlap in the lore,
maybe fairies and leprecrons are manifestations of gin. If you
were to ask some folks, actually, they'd say, all supernatural
(15:15):
beings and phenomena are some form of Gin or another,
whether those beings are playful and harmless or their destructive
and evil UFO sightings. Gin, human possessions, Jin, crop circles.
Gin magician David Blaine, Oh, definitely a gin, and believe
(15:36):
it or not. According to a two thousand six report
in The Economist, factions in Somalia and Ifhanistan have accused
their enemies of being backed not only by the CIA,
but by malevolent gin. One theory in if Ahanistan holds
that the Mujahideen scared the Gin out into the world,
causing disharmony. It is the Gin, they say, who whisper
(15:56):
into the ears of suicide bombers. So while it's seems
that there are some people who see gin everywhere and
in everything, scholars and enthusiasts have categorized the Gin into
four broad categories, and each of these four kinds will
once again sound pretty familiar to you. First, there are
(16:21):
the Gin who live among humans, the ones who inhabit
our homes right alongside with us, which are called the omar.
After all, we have all heard about house hauntings. Countless
books and films have been made about supernatural dwellers, often
evil and violent, that really want their space to themselves.
These beings do everything in their power to get rid
(16:43):
of whatever hapless family unwittingly moved into their territory. But
unlike what Hollywood would have you believe, not all of
our co inhabitants are violent psychopaths. Most of the time,
they just want to live right alongside with you in
their own parallel plane without even letting you know that
they are. Other times, however, they may like to mess
with you or just let you know that they're in charge.
(17:06):
In two thousand nine, a Saudi family was so fed
up with being harassed by gin in their house they
finally took the gin to court. You heard me right,
They sued the unseen entity in an actual court of law.
The lawsuit filed by the family, which was joined by
every member of the family, alleged that the Jin had
for the previous two years, stolen their cell phones, left
(17:28):
them threatening voicemails maybe from those very same cell phones,
helded them with rocks every time they left the house
at night and frightened the children. They heard voices, first
a woman's voice, that a man's telling them to get
out of the house, and whispering threats. Now, the court
took the matter seriously because it wasn't like it was
just one person making the allegations. It was the entire family,
(17:52):
So they investigated, but of course they found it wasn't
easy to substantiate the charges. Many different media was reported
the case, which seems to suggest it was unusual enough
to make the news, although it would be great fun
to exclusively have a jin docket. Anyway, there isn't any
information out there about the court's ultimate verdict, and the
(18:13):
lawyer in me can't help but wonder what damages the
family was asking for. Do they want their cell phones back,
an apology for the voicemails and exorcism. Well, what we
do know is the family eventually just moved out, So
I guess you could say the defendant one. Then there
are the kind of gin that terrify every living parent
(18:35):
on earth. If you've ever raised some little ones, at
some point you may have seen your child communicating with
something or someone invisible to you, but not invisible to
your child. We've all seen that spooky black and white
child monitor video footage where some toddler in a crib
is deep in conversation, babbling, laughing, pointing, responding to what
(18:59):
looks like nothing there at all. It could be that
the child is in fact having a chat with an arwa,
the kind of gin that just love babies. You could
call them baby whisperers. These gin attacks themselves to small
children many times. It's not out of any malice, but
because they're kind of baby crazy. They love the coops
(19:21):
and gurgles and innocent wonder as much as we do.
Maybe they even love that fresh baby powder and mixed
with warm milk smell. Some of them can't stand it
if someone is mean to a child. They are there
to play with and protect their tiny friends. That doesn't
mean there aren't others that love to torment children, but
(19:41):
most just take advantage of the fact that the children
are more receptive to them. Unlike adults. The veil between
the scene and the unseen is thinner for little ones,
and it's believed that both animals and children are able
to see gin and communicate with them easily. A two
thousand six article titled of children. Engin in the Journal
(20:02):
of Cultural Anthropology chronicled just such a situation. The author,
a researcher staying at the home of her professor, was
shocked to learn that his family had for years lived
with multiple gin in their home. The gin had apparently
been gifted to them by an acquaintance, if we could
call that a gift, an acquaintance who inherited them from
(20:24):
his own father. But the acquaintance apparently had too many
jin to know what to do with, so he sent
a group of his gin companions to the home of
his friend, the professor, gifting him one jin for every
male member of the family. But the jin didn't communicate
with the family through the male members that they had
been assigned to. Instead, their main conduit was the eight
(20:45):
year old daughter of the family, Mariam. Mariam was the
only member of the family who could see the jin,
see them actually interspersed with her family, hanging out and
about with them. She could read with a jin desired
in the palms of her hands, and when family members
had questions or needed advice from the gin, little muddy
Um was the one to pass on the message. Once
(21:08):
a gin told muddy Um he really wanted to experience
what human food tasted like. She told her father, the Professor,
and with his permission, she told the jin to go
ahead and enter her father's body to find out. And
so apparently that's exactly what the gin did. The Professor
was suddenly seized with an uncontrollable appetite, and he ate
(21:29):
and ate and ate until the household ran out of food.
The gin that muddy Um and her family felt closest
to was named Soleiman. He was thousands of years old,
older even than Christianity, and muddy Um described him as
tall with the long white beard, and he wore clean,
spotless white clothing. While he was usually serious, he was
(21:51):
very gentle, especially with muddy Um. The child was never
frightened by him. For years, the family itself never interacted
with the gin except through muddy Um, and in effect,
this female child commanded a great deal of power over
them in a time and place where female children might
not otherwise. Eventually, Muddyum lost her ability as childhood gave
(22:13):
away to puberty. The family tried to get her younger sister, Fatima,
to take her place, but Fatima was not as willing
a medium as muddy Um. She was scared of the gin,
and also upset that they did not seem to be
doing her bidding. Eventually, the family just kind of gave
the gin back to their acquaintance who had gifted it
to them in the first place. They're lucky that the
(22:35):
parting was amicable, because it isn't always like that, which
brings us to the third broad category of gin, which
all kind of fall within a spectrum of well evil.
(22:57):
The least powerful of all the evil gin are the Shyadine,
and if you think that word sounds familiar, it should
because it's Arabic for a bunch of Satan's. The Shayatine
keep busy inspiring mankind to do evil deeds through whisperers
and black thoughts. Then there are the marid, which are
powerful gin that can be summoned by black magic, who
(23:18):
only do the opposite of what they're commanded, and who
are related to water elements living around lakes, waterfalls, rivers,
oceans I think mermaids, but really terrifying ones. Finally, there
are the Ifrit, known to be the largest, fastest, strongest,
coming in all shapes and sizes and abilities, and the
(23:38):
most evil of them all. You could even call them demons,
and some say that the angry, vengeful spirits of those
who died violent unnatural debts could also be a free.
You might be surprised to know that the happy dancing
genie in a bottle that comes from the Arabian tail
in One thousand and one Nights is in fact, and
a free and a freath have made their way into
(24:01):
other modern Western pop culture, and a freak character makes
an appearance in both the television series True Blood and
the blockbuster Neil game and novel American Gods. And if
you're a gamer, you might know that you can summon
an a freat in the Final Fantasy video game. These
blips of publicity notwithstanding, undeniably, the most infamous account of
(24:22):
the freet is thousands of years old, and it's the
story of the gin that were believed to be enslaved
by the great Biblical King Solomon. That's right. One of
the many divine abilities granted to the legendary King Solomon
was a power to control the jin. According to the
Muslim tradition, it was through this power that Solomon was
(24:43):
able to become one of the most powerful rulers the
world has ever seen. King Solomon commanded the legions of
Gin to do his bidding, sending Jin armies to fight
off his enemies and using Gin labor to build never
before seen architectural marvels like the First Temple of Jerusalem.
In fact, the city of Jerusalem itself, along with its
(25:06):
ancient walls, is said to be built by Solomon's Jin slaves.
There are rabbinical interpretations that say that the massive stones
that built the temple cried out with actual voices and
moved themselves to the construction site. Other stories say that
the female Jin mined the great stones from quarries and
carried them to the sacred site, accounting for the appearance
(25:29):
of the stones moving by themselves. There are Hebrew rabbinical
commentaries about Ecclesiastes to eight, in which Solomon himself describes
how he collected quote a shidda vestidote, a phrase meaning demons.
Another ancient text further described Solomon's enslavement of supernatural beings
(25:50):
to carry out his will. That text is called the
Testament of Solomon and it dates from around two This
magical text, which is leave to have its origins in
the first century, is in fact ascribed to King Solomon himself.
While it's not considered a biblical canon, it is supposedly
a first hand account of the building of the First Temple,
(26:12):
though there is disagreement as to his authorship, which can
of course certainly be expected of a two thousand year
old document. Now, according to the story, the master workman
at the temple's construction site had a young son who
King Solomon was quite fond of. The son, like his father,
worked and earned wages, but over time, the child grew
(26:32):
thinner and thinner and weaker would every passing day. It
turned out a vampiric jin named Orneus had been creeping
into the worker's camp every night, stealing the boy's food
and wages, and sucking the child's life energy, his blood,
in other words, right out of the boys right thumb.
(26:52):
When Solomon learned of this, he prayed and prayed that
God would give him the power to deal with Orneus.
One day, that prayer was aswered when, according to Solomon's Testament,
the archangel Michael brought him a powerful ring forged out
of iron and copper, so bright and shiny that Solomon
could hardly look at it. The ring was engraved with
(27:13):
two interlocking triangles, creating a hexagram, and within the hexagram
was the tech a grammaton the four letters symbolizing the
most powerful name of God. The engraving on this ring
has come to be known as the famed Seal of Solomon.
The ring allowed Solomon to control all the gin in
this world and in every dimension, and the Testament of
(27:35):
Solomon actually lists many of the gin, at least the
notable ones that King Solomon summoned to appear before him
to account for their deeds and to be sentenced accordingly.
One of the gin that Solomon commanded before him was
a no nosculis, whose form was half woman and half mule.
(27:57):
She told Solomon she was born from the voice of
the go of a black heaven, emitted in matter. She
dwelled in caves and jungles, and she seduced and strangled
men for her sins. Solomon sentence a Noscelis to make
hemp ropes for the construction of the Temple day and night.
Another Jin that the ring dragged before Solomon with Ashmadai,
(28:20):
one of the most powerful Jin. The story of Ashmada's
humiliation in front of Solomon doesn't only appear in the
Testament of Solomon. It also appears in the Babylonian Talmud,
a Hebrew text of collected documents between the third and
six centuries, a couple of hundred years after the Testament,
and this Talmud tells a similar tale of King Solomon
(28:43):
enslaving Ashmadi to build the temple. But Ashmadi wasn't any
old demon. He was called the King of Demons, and
Renaissance Christians called Ashmadi the King of nine Hells, the
demon prince of the deadly sin of lust, so clearly
he had a long standing and terrifying reputation. Ashmadi told
(29:05):
King Solomon that he was the offspring of an angel
and a human woman. For those of you familiar with
the Old Testament, you might recall the story in the
Book of Enoch about the Watchers, or the Sons of
God as they were called angels, who disobeyed God's command,
descended to Earth to take earthly wives, and then bore
beastly offspring, called the Nephelim. Maybe that's what ashman I
(29:28):
was claiming to be one of the Nephelum. Nonetheless, ashman
I specialties included driving people to insanity, causing them to
commit murder, interfering in marriages, and causing enmity between people.
For these sins, Solomon sent us, the demon king, to
be weakened by iron, a metal that Jin are terrified
of because it causes them pain and harm, and to
(29:51):
make clay for the temple by trampling the ground. Now
you may be thinking, well, was it Gin or demons
that King Solomon controlled? But the answer is both, because,
as we said before, the universe of Gin includes the
most evil of them, better known as demons, and yes,
even Satan himself. But more on Satan later in the series,
(30:14):
because believe me, you can't talk about Jin without talking
about Satan. Back to Solomon, though the enslavement of scores
of Gin apparently rubbed many of them the wrong way,
Ashmad I raised an immortal battle cry against all mankind, declaring,
and your tyranny will be short over us, and then
(30:34):
we will again have free range over mankind, so as
that they will regard us as if we were gods,
not knowing men that they are the names of the
angels set over us. And so to this day there
remains a legion of Gin who are still peeved off
at the indignities that they suffered on the Solomon, because remember,
(30:55):
they lived for thousands of years. You see, Solomon didn't
just enslave of scores of them. Others he imprisoned in
brass and iron vessels sealed with a magical spell. Yet
others were locked up for eternity and rings made of
precious gems guarded by powerful talisman. For all we know,
these many Gin, the hundreds of thousands or millions of them,
(31:18):
are still locked up to this day. And back then
it became pretty clear to the Gin that no good
could come from men having control of them. We don't
know about the Gin imprisoned in vessels and rings with
the Jin enslaved by King Solomon were finally released when he,
according to the Testament, failed a test of faith by God.
(31:39):
The ring that he used to control his Gin slaves
and Jin army was in fact stolen by a Jin
who morphed himself into a Solomon look like and ruled
for forty days pretending to be the king. In some traditions,
it said that King Solomon regained the ring and continued
to lord over his hordes of Gin, but one day,
as he stood leaning on his staff, watching the Jin
(32:01):
slaves work and build his many projects in the Holy Land.
He quietly died, but no one realized it because he
was standing holding onto the staff. He didn't topple over,
even though he was very much dead. His body continued
to stay upright leaning on the staff, and no one
realized he died. So the Jin continued to slave away,
(32:24):
thinking that their master was still watching them. Finally, though,
the staff was eaten through by worms, and the mighty
King Solomon finally fell to the earth, alerting his slaves
that the king was no more and that their years
of humiliation and forced labor had ended. A Jin traveled
far and wide to the outer reaches of Solomon's kingdom
(32:46):
to tell the others, shake the dust of your labor
and go your way, and so they did, gaining their
freedom at last. No one since King Solomon has ever
been able to have command over the higher creation of Gin,
likely because the ring that held that power disappeared. Legend
(33:07):
has it that Solomon's ring, sword, and crown are buried
on an island in a lake, and see what Egypt.
No one, however, has ever found these treasures, and another
legend says that they will not re emerge until the
end times when the great apocalyptic Beast appears, who will
be wielding both Solomon's staff and his seal. But until then,
(33:35):
there are still ways for human beings to get jin
to do their bidding, because there are always jin who
are willing to well negotiate their powers with us mere mortals.
So yes, there are ways if you want a gin
at your beck and call to get one, But more
on that in a later episode. For now, we move
on to the final category of gin, the ones that
(33:58):
we are born and die with. The Karen are constant companions.
According to the tradition, each one of us is born
with a Karen, which literally means constant companion, a jin
assigned to us at birth that lives with us throughout
our lives and dies with us when we die. At
(34:18):
least that's the most common understanding of what the Karen are.
This Jin, like others, has commonalities with much more ancient beings.
The Babylonians believed in a demon called the Cid, which,
while having evil properties, was also a guardian spirit attached
to human beings, much like the Assyrian deity Lamassu, also
a protective creature. Then there is the Christian Guardian Angel,
(34:42):
a more familiar being to our understanding. The point of
departure is this, though not all scholars believe the Karen
are necessarily protective. In fact, many believe the Karen are
evil jin, meant to confuse and lead man astray at
every turn from the moment of his birth until his death,
kind of like a little devil on your shoulder, would
bring you into things you know you shouldn't be doing.
(35:06):
And others believe that the karn is a person's double
or even a familiar. Now, you might be most familiar
with the familiar as an animal companion to say which,
but historically the understanding of a familiar was much more broad.
Philosopher Pierre Refard defined a familiar as possibly being a
double ganger or a totem spirit, or perhaps even a
(35:29):
personal demon. In some traditions, it's said that because the
Jin are created with free will, the kren to chose
what they want to do of their own free accord,
but they can be brought under the control of their
human through various spiritual rituals and black magic. One way
they say, to weaken the grip your kren has over
you is basically to just be a good person. It
(35:52):
said that the more evil a person engages in, the
more powerful his karine becomes, pushing him or her to
worse and worse acts. After all, the beast you feed
is the one that will win. What makes a green
particularly insidious to human beings, maybe more so than any
other gin, is the fact that they've been with you
(36:12):
since the day you were born, so they know everything
about you. They've witnessed everything you've ever done or said.
They know your deepest desires, your weaknesses, your secrets, which
means if they wanted, they could manipulate you like a
puppet master. So it seems like your best bet is
too well, just keep your careen on your good side,
(36:33):
because we're better or worse, this is one companion you'll
never be able to shake. Thanks for joining us this week.
Next week we'll be back to take you on another
step into the world of the Hidden Gin. Until then,
remember we are not alone. If you have a GIN story,
(36:57):
drop us a line at the Hidden jin in at
gmail dot com and remember that's Gin with the D,
D J, I N N, and tell us all about
it along with your contact information. You never know you
might hear back from me, and if you're a GIN enthusiast,
you can get more gin content on our Patreon page,
where I'll be dropping full length interviews with GIN experts
(37:18):
and scholars, as well as conversations with people who have
had firsthand GIN experiences. So check it out at patreon
dot com slash Hidden Gin. Finally, don't forget to follow
us on social media. You can find us both on
Twitter and Facebook with the handle at the Hidden Gin.
The Hidden Gin is a production of I Heart Radio
(37:40):
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
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(38:02):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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