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Magical Jinn and where to Find them with Mark Allen Peterson - Episode 88
372 Plays7 years ago
Today we talk with Dr. Mark Allen Peterson about the magical Jinn. Dr. Peterson tells us more about the ancient concept of Jinn, how that affect modern Arabic uses of Jinn, and how the views on Jinn are affected by Movies and Western tampering.
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 88
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to the Archaeological Fantasies Podcast, Episode 88. I'm your host, Sarah Head, with my co-hosts today, Ken Fader and Jeb Card.
Exploring the Concept of Jhin with Dr. Mark Allen Peterson
00:00:20
Speaker
And today we're talking to special guest Dr. Mark Allen Peterson from Miami University in Ohio. Today we're talking about Jhin, not the wonderful drink, but the spooky evil spirits that haunt lamps and grant wishes. We talked to Dr. Peterson about the reality of Jhin. What were these creatures?
00:00:22
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:37
Speaker
How were they described in the Bible? How were they represented in ancient Egypt? And how are they represented today in modern Arabic cultures? Get ready to think critically. Hey everyone, and welcome to the Archaeological Fantasies podcast.
Seasonal Changes and Personal Updates
00:00:55
Speaker
I am your host, Sarah, and I am joined today with my co-hosts, Ken Fader and Jeff Card. How's it going, guys?
00:01:01
Speaker
doing all right. Just we finally are now getting fall weather that actually looks and feels like fall weather. The never ending summer is apparently over, knock on wood. And I found out that my book is probably coming out in May it sounds like with maybe some preliminary stuff a little earlier than that. So that's what I'm up to.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yay, exciting. And Ken, how you doing? Hey, you know, I'm doing all right. Like Jeff here in New England, we are finally experiencing something that is similar to fall and the leaves are starting to change. And it's real pretty, real pretty weather that we're having. So, uh, and we're coming up, we're looking at midterms coming up pretty quickly. So don't remind me. Yes, the blanket of midterms. Yeah. Our, our, our grades are doing a few days and, uh, yeah, yeah.
00:01:52
Speaker
I'm terrified of the papers, I have it right. But anyway, we are joined today with a special guest, Mark Allen Peterson.
Cultural Interpretations of Jhin
00:02:00
Speaker
He is going to be our resident expert on gin today. And that's J-I-N-N.
00:02:08
Speaker
As an archaeologist, we all just come over ourselves jumping in to make sure we know we're not talking about the spirit, but the other spirit. Very good, very good, Jim. Might also be an expert in gin. These ethnographers. These ethnographers. We're just grabbing them all. They're like Pokemon. We're collecting them.
00:02:35
Speaker
But Mark, when I mentioned that we're talking about a spirit, not a spirit, is a spirit even a proper term? And has our audience ever even heard of these? Well, everybody knows what a genie is. You know, genies are these wish-granting spirits from the Middle East that are trapped in objects. And if you release them from the object, then they grant you wishes, usually three wishes.
00:03:04
Speaker
This is a Western reimagination of a Middle Eastern being called a jinn, one of the three creations of God. God created angels, jinn, and humans. And like angels, they're magical and they're part of the invisible world, but like humans, they have free will and they are
00:03:29
Speaker
capable, some of them, of doing extraordinary magical feats. And so they're sort of betwixt in between the supernatural world and the ordinary world. I don't think most...
00:03:43
Speaker
People in the Middle East would think of them as spirits always. Sometimes they very clearly have bodies, but other times they can also take possession of you the way that demons are imagined to take possession of you in the West. They're sort of betwixt and between spirits and embodied beings as well.
00:04:06
Speaker
So it sounds a lot like our episode that we did on fairies last year, where they're sort of the people that are betwixt, they're not quite gods, they're not quite angels, they're not quite people. Yes. Go ahead. I'm sorry. That was rude. I was just going to say, fairies are a good analogy for Jin in many ways. Not entirely, because Jin also have these very important connections to devils and demons. But in many ways, they're very much like fairies.
00:04:37
Speaker
So Mark, what you're telling me is that those of us of a certain age who grew up watching, I dream of Jeannie. And then we took our kids to the Disney movie Aladdin. And so Jeannie's are like Robin Williams, that that's all a Western creation. Yeah. And it's, it's especially interesting how that came about because around the time that
00:04:59
Speaker
In the 18th century, that capitalism was really, print capitalism was emerging. We have this series of translations of Álfleila Waleila, The Thousand Nights in a Night, which contains a number of stories about genies.
00:05:20
Speaker
As this came in to the West, Westerners tended to pick up only on a couple of the stories, and there's a story where a man falls in love with and goes through adventures and marries, a gene from under the sea, there are
Western Wish-Granting Jhin
00:05:36
Speaker
stories about powerful jinn who do all kinds of terrible things there's jinn who get killed and their relatives seek revenge but the ones that westerners tend to focus on are the were the aladdin story and the story of the jinn of the
00:05:54
Speaker
gin in the fishermen where he releases a gin and it's going to destroy him and he gets it to grant him wishes instead. And so this idea of gin in objects, a lamp or a ring in Aladdin or a brass bottle in the case of the fishermen in the gin, that's what sort of took hold in the Western imagination.
00:06:15
Speaker
Interesting. Interesting. That again kind of ties us into our fairy stuff because I've talked about this. I think that old objects often, if they lose their identity, often get attributed to these extra humans, these people that are not us. We talked about the
00:06:35
Speaker
the luck of Eden Hall, which is actually a medieval Syrian cup, but it becomes a fairy cup once it loses that identity. And so you're saying the ones that grant wishes tied to objects, I'm actually wondering if there's a little syncretism with fairy traditions when they adopt these particular ones. Yeah, I think so. I think that in many ways what happened was
00:07:03
Speaker
Europe already had a whole set of mythic characters that inhabited certain kinds of structural positions in the way they told stories. We had fairies, we had ghosts, we had demons and devils, and in the Middle East, gin can occupy any of those things.
00:07:23
Speaker
tempters that are trying to win your soul away from God. They can be somehow connected with spirits of the dead or take on both the image and personality of your dead relatives. They can possess you like devils or demons. They can also live in liminal spaces like caves and forest groves and rivers, isolated river valleys and
00:07:53
Speaker
They abandon houses often. Exactly, yes. And then they can encounter people and reward them or punish them for their good behavior or bad behavior, as happens in fairy tales. Along that line, I think one of the interesting traits of the Djinn that you brought up, though, is that they are considered creatures of free will.
00:08:15
Speaker
on top of all of that. So it's not as if they are compelled to be evil or compelled to be good, even though they're recognized as being one of the creations of God.
King Solomon and Jhin Control
00:08:25
Speaker
So I found that to be interesting in how that parallels, they're like, they're like super humans, basically, like, they're basically humans, but they have these powers.
00:08:37
Speaker
They're basically humans. They have these powers. There are definitely some Jin who in the story seem to be much weaker than others. When you hear the term Efreet and Efreet of the Jin and Efreet seems to be a term for power.
00:08:53
Speaker
And so, an affreet is a jinn who has enormous powers. King Solomon is put in command of affreets and he can command an affreet to take his throne all the way around the world in the blink of an eye, we're told. And so- Do we know how old that story or like, not just the affreet, but the whole, can we dive into that a little, the King Solomon story?
00:09:22
Speaker
Well, I don't know how old it is. It's certainly very well known throughout the Islamic world. King Solomon was given power over the djinn. It was part of that gift of wisdom that both the Bible and the Quran talk about.
00:09:37
Speaker
In the Qur'an, he's given power over the jinn. He has a seal, the seal of Solomon, which he can use. In Al-Fleila-Waleila, the Thousand and One Nights, there's a story called the City of Brass, and these people are searching for the City of Brass where hundreds of these brass bottles that Suleiman put evil jinn and afreets into and sealed them away are
00:10:06
Speaker
available for people to take. And so they're searching for the city of Brass. It's a quest story. But when they get there, it's not what they think. So there's this
00:10:18
Speaker
The notion that Suleiman the Great was the greatest of the ancient pre-Muhammad kings and he was given these powers by God to command the Efreetz and many contemporary sorcerers and sorcerers through history in the Middle East have commanded Efreetz and Jin through the power of the Seal of Solomon.
00:10:45
Speaker
And that's how you build things. So one of the things that you can do is you can build the city of Palmyra. Some people have claimed some travelers have claimed was built by gin or the city of Petra or the dome of the rock even some people or the pyramids. People have claimed these were built by gin. They're too beautiful, too awesome to have been built by ordinary humans.
00:11:12
Speaker
Yeah. And we, to prepare for this, we read an article by Drieskins and Lucarella that talks about modern Egyptians, some modern Egyptians talking about, oh, the pharaohs must have been powerful sorcerers. They controlled the number of jinn to basically do their bidding, which is sort of a very different take than the sort of Western ancient aliens perspective.
00:11:35
Speaker
Right.
Distinguishing Jhin Possession from Mental Illness
00:11:36
Speaker
Well, that's because we know if you live in the Middle East, you live around gin. You know gin exists even if you don't have a direct encounter with them. Most people you know can tell you stories of encounters with gin. It's rarely they themselves who encountered the gin. It's usually an uncle or a cousin or someone. A friend of a friend.
00:11:59
Speaker
A friend of a friend. I've had students tell me when I taught at the American University in Cairo, I had students tell me about their uncle's encounter with sorcerers who had control of gin and who did uncanny things that were inexplicable if gin don't exist. I've had
00:12:18
Speaker
I had a very interesting dinner with a psychiatrist once who had a degree from an American university and, you know, he talked about the challenge of distinguishing between when someone is mentally ill and when they are possessed by a djinn. And I've seen articles like that as well.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, and so you have to, for the psychiatrist, this is a very important determination because if they try to treat someone who's possessed of a gin, not only will be unsuccessful, but all kinds of terrible things can happen to everyone involved. That's got to be turned over to someone who has expertise in getting rid of gin, whereas
00:13:04
Speaker
If you take someone who's mentally ill and you turn them over to someone who expels gin, then you run the risk of making their mental illness worse. So they see this as a real problem. That sounds very much like you'll hear people talk about, how do you distinguish mental illness from possession? Do you call the priest or do you call a psychiatrist and how do you distinguish those two conditions? That sounds very similar.
00:13:33
Speaker
Oh, I think I was hearing actually that there's a branch that still performs exorcisms. And this is, of course, completely third hand. So feel free to poo poo it. But apparently one of the things they do first is they make you go through a battery of psychological exams to make sure there's not something psychologically wrong with you that could explain the quote unquote possession before they perform the exorcism. But they're still willing to perform the exorcism. You know, sure.
00:13:57
Speaker
So I've heard that as well, but I probably know about no more than you do on that. Yeah, it's something I heard on another podcast. So it has to be factually true. So Mark, if people are beset by bad luck, if somebody's car breaks down and there's a perfectly no good reason for it, are gin presumed to be the culprits of bad luck happening to otherwise good people? Actually, more often that's going to be attributed to the evil eye.
The Evil Eye and Protective Practices
00:14:27
Speaker
Oh, oh, so if I'm if I'm having a comparison. Well, so they're, they're, they're actually there's there's absolutely they have nothing in common. What the evil eye is a kind of magic that we're all capable of doing.
00:14:48
Speaker
When we look at someone with envy or with anger, extreme anger, some people have more of this capacity than others. None of us have ever done this on this show, ever. Exactly, of course. Not on any of the episodes I've listened to.
00:15:07
Speaker
What happens is if I'm miserly, if I own a shop and I'm overly competitive with my fellow shopkeepers or I go in for ostentatious displays of wealth and I'm spending lots of money on things and I'm not giving to the poor, if I'm behaving in ways that are sort of anti-social,
00:15:32
Speaker
Then people will, there will be these social implications, and one of them will happen to me is the evil eye. People are looking at me with envy, with anger, with mistrust, and this has physical effects.
00:15:48
Speaker
Uh, other people are believed to just have the evil eye in a kind of sorceress way. There's certain people who just, you want to avoid, they're, they're just always angry and maybe they're possessed of a gin. So you could get the gin in here that way. And so their glances, even if they're unjust could still affect you.
00:16:05
Speaker
But for the most part, you try to ward them off with amulets. Almost everyone I know, there are blue amulets, blue and brass amulets that you can get anywhere in the Middle East. Any shop, any marketplace you go to, there's somebody selling these. I have one in my office.
00:16:31
Speaker
But one of the most fascinating things is mirrors historically could chase away the evil eye. You know, you could sort of reflect the evil eye back at people. So taxi drivers in Cairo started hanging old CD-ROMs.
00:16:51
Speaker
from their rearview mirrors. These things spin around and they're perfect mirrors on one side. Well, that's fascinating because that was a big thing in, I want to say especially the 90s and early 2000s in El Salvador. And I don't know why. And I've asked people and I've heard things like, oh, they got sent back by relatives in the States and they didn't have anything to do with that. I honestly have no idea, but the
00:17:18
Speaker
CDs hanging from the rearview mirror, like the central rearview mirror inside the car was a huge thing in El Salvador. I haven't seen it as much recently. That's interesting. Well, in the Middle East, it's reflecting the evil eye. It's warding up. Do they still do it today? Is that still a practice today? I know I've seen it here in the States occasionally, but
00:17:41
Speaker
not like Jeff was saying since maybe the late 90s, early 2000s? I was the last time, let's see, I know they were still doing it in 2010. Oh, there you go. Okay. So, fairly recently. That's fair enough. The other thing you mentioned was blue glass amulets and I think I've seen some of the ones you have actually. Yeah. Do you have any knowledge as to why blue and glass, I have a reason for asking.
00:18:09
Speaker
I don't. I know that blue is universally around the Mediterranean. You'll meet Greeks and people from the French coast on the Mediterranean who also believe in the evil eye and who also make use of blue-glass amulets. Blue-glass beads. Blue porcelain is okay. If you have porcelain, you painted a shiny blue.
00:18:33
Speaker
There's particular things eyes are especially valuable there's a particular figurine Figure called the hand of Fatima, which is the name of God written in such a way that The letters of God's name Allah form fingers
00:18:54
Speaker
And so the hand of Fatima is one of the preferred amulets. So there's a number of these. Well, it just puts in mind, maybe because I was teaching this today, blue glass faience amulets from Egypt.
00:19:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's no reason not to believe that it goes back that far. I mean, I'd like to see something connective, but it just reminds me of it. Can you explain what that is real quick, because I don't think everybody's aware. So in classical Egypt, but I think it's I mean, I think throughout
00:19:25
Speaker
like pharaonic Egypt, but especially in the later period when you have, you know, the Ptolemaic and the Greeks and then the larger Hellenistic and then after. You have people and Mark, feel free to jump in if I say anything stupid here. You have amulets with
00:19:43
Speaker
various symbols, many of them sort of icons of various deities. The most famous one, you've all seen this, the sort of Egyptian eye is, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, the wedge shot. It's the sort of the eye of the sun and eye of Horus, and it is a protective symbol. And while they can be made of various things, the most common thing you see these things in is a blue faience, which is, it's kind of like, I think it's called frit. It's a glass, but it's not translucent.
00:20:13
Speaker
I think most Egyptians would be willing to believe that there's a continuity because they tend to, my friends anyway, would tend to say that
00:20:29
Speaker
ancient Egyptians were doing the same things. They were pagans, so they consorted with jinn in ways that contemporary Muslims aren't supposed to, but they had to ward off the evil eye just like contemporary people do. They had to deal with sorcery and the enslavement of jinn and the potential of possession by jinn.
00:20:54
Speaker
The explanation of the eye I have heard is never that it's historically related to the eye of Ra because that would make it haram and you couldn't use it. So the contemporary explanation is, you know, you're making an image of an eye because you're warding off the evil eye. It's, you know, gold fashion, golden bow, Frasier, you know, sympathetic magic kinds of magic. Yeah, sympathetic magic.
00:21:16
Speaker
That's really great. Let's go to break real quick. And when we come back, I want to talk about this intersection of ancient Egyptian faith, archaeology, and gin.
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00:21:33
Speaker
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00:21:56
Speaker
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00:22:08
Speaker
everyone and we are back and we are still talking with Mark Allen Peterson. And I really wanted to talk about the article that Jeb sent us to prepare us for this podcast. And it's the untying, the magic of the pharaoh and it's Barbara Draskin and Rita Lucarelli. Yeah, like Draskins and Lucarelli, something like that. I don't know them.
00:22:34
Speaker
And I apologize that I mispronounced your names, but it's a really great article and I want to touch on specifically the concept of the Shakes and their use of their personal djinn to locate archaeological sites and then clear those sites of evil djinn or evil spirits so that the sites are safe for looting.
00:23:00
Speaker
Not because I want to talk about looting, but it sounds very much like psychic archaeology, something that we've talked about in the show before. And just the concept of using them as like bloodhounds is kind of a neat concept.
00:23:14
Speaker
I mean, can you even call them evil if their job is to protect these gyms from looting? They're not really evil. Excellent point. And can we actually start with a definition of shake? Because honestly, for me, before looking into this a few years ago, I just thought it meant like local important person or something like that. Yeah. In many ways it does. And so if I have control of a gym, I'm a local important person.
00:23:41
Speaker
That's fair. You know, a sheik can be the person who leads prayer at a mosque. A sheik can be a local authority in a village. It can be a tribal authority within a lineage. That's how I often would have thought of it, yeah. But if I may, if I have control of a jinn, sheik is going to be a title people are going to give me. And I would emphasize here too that on this notion of good and evil,
00:24:12
Speaker
Good jinn are jinn that choose to follow God, and bad jinn are jinn who choose to not follow God. All of these jinn involved in finding treasures and guarding treasures are enslaved.
00:24:30
Speaker
So someone through sorcery has enslaved a djinn to be a guardian spirit of their tomb. So if I'm a pharaoh and I have command of, if not command of djinn, I have command of people who have command of djinn, then I'm going to get a djinn to guard my tomb. And if I'm a sheikh who can
00:24:52
Speaker
take control of gin, then I can use that to combat those gin. And if I'm a grave robber, the last thing I want to do is face a supernatural menace if I don't have something supernatural to fight it with. Right. Yeah. That's a, that's a pretty cross-cultural, uh, pro tip there. Just never do that. Don't that's, you know, Laura Croft is, is, you know, she needs a gym. Yeah.
00:25:18
Speaker
Okay. Aside from that. And I killed that. I killed that. Well, honestly, one of the reasons is I'm trying to hold back and not say, Hey, this sounds just like, and then say fairies again. But there, I mean, I literally have, it does sound like the fairies thing though. I mean, it does there. I have literally a reproduction of a grimoire about how to do exactly this, how to
00:25:46
Speaker
basically get fairies and spirits because they're kind of the same thing and demons all together under your control to do things. And of course, if we have the genie from the gin, the modern version of that would be the leprechaun. Oh, catch the leprechaun. He has to give you three wishes because you've stolen his pot of gold or something like that, which sounds awfully familiar.
00:26:11
Speaker
One thing that, so we mentioned the Draskins and Lucarella and I think that's fascinating because they did a study of how people have seen it in the past and the present. Mark, what is the name of and where can our listeners find? We can repeat this at the end, but the article that you were working on or you worked on, you mentioned the sort of gin to genie.
00:26:33
Speaker
Oh, so I have an article called From Gin to Genies. It's in a book called Folklore Cinema, edited by Sharon Sherman and Michael Coven. Okay. And I think it's actually available online. It's part of not the Haditha, but there's the other, the one that makes a lot of things available online because I went and found a scanned copy or you gave me one, but then we found it online like a much cleaner one. So we should be able to put that in the show notes.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think Utah State University at some point made the book available online in its entirety. Yeah, no. And so we should definitely read that. And you talked about in that a number of
00:27:18
Speaker
more obscure to I think Western audiences, but movies that sort of combine the two that are in the Middle East, you know, in the area where gin are very prevalent, but have elements also of the Western kind of transformation to the genie as well. Yeah. So one of the, one of the things that fascinates me, I mean, so historically gin
00:27:45
Speaker
probably were spirits of location prior to Islam and they were clearly so well understood by Arabs that when Muhammad had his revelation and
Jhin in Pre-Islamic and Islamic Contexts
00:28:00
Speaker
issue the Quran, the spoke the Quran, the Jin are in there, taken for granted that there's these three kinds of beings. So this is not being introduced to that, but what do you mean by spirit of location? I think I know, but could you spell that out a little?
00:28:17
Speaker
Throughout the Mediterranean, you had these ancient Greek myth and Roman myth and Etruscan and Asia Minor, you had little gods of places, the god of the grove, the god of the rocks, the god of the forest, the god of this cave.
00:28:38
Speaker
specific places and people do little propitiary things so that terrible things would happen. Then if you built nearby, people had to propitiate these gods. There's evidence that the ancient Egyptians believed in these soul gods. They seem to be very widespread throughout ancient Mediterranean lore.
00:29:03
Speaker
One theory is that this is what jinn were prior to their being sort of canonized in Islam and explained by Muhammad as where they actually fit in. Between angels which are made of light and humans who are made of clay, we have the jinn who are made of smokeless fire.
00:29:21
Speaker
So instead of rejecting this as superstition of ancient people, those things are real, but we know what they are, and they are gin. Exactly. And if you think about that, that's a very powerful way to missionize. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because you have to say, look, your ancestors weren't wrong. They just didn't really know what they were doing. And they're putting their worship in the wrong direction.
00:29:48
Speaker
But they weren't crazy or deluded or foolish. Right. And we see a lot of that today. Right. And I also think it's interesting to borrow a page out of Jeff's book, that whole idea of them being specific to an area. There are many fairies that are tied to a specific area or a specific thing.
00:30:10
Speaker
I mean, can I ask the question of do you have an idea as to why there seems to be so much of an overlap or do you think it's just a coincidence? I think that fairies are reworking in the medieval imagination of these same kinds of ancient propitiary deities of place and they get reworked in the popular imagination. They absorb a lot of things.
00:30:40
Speaker
And I think the same thing is true of gin. Gin absorb a lot of things. I mean, there are other supernatural creatures that people will talk about, like Googles. And now they're not related to gin. Well, this is the trick. Yes and no. If you start to try to pin someone down,
00:31:05
Speaker
since ghouls aren't mentioned in the Quran or the hadith, they seem to be a kind of jinn. And so the boundaries of these things get very vague from one story to another.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, and that's not super surprising. One of the things I think a lot of people that come from a background that's not a true believer, and they try to grapple with a lot of stuff we talk about in the show, they'll often try to create a taxonomy or try to create, I mean, I remember doing this, and then you quickly realize it's a terrible, terrible decision, because that's just not how this works.
00:31:45
Speaker
Let me riff off of something you were mentioning. You suggested that it's the same sort of these new traditions coming in and dealing with spirits of place, gods of place, an enchanted landscape. Is this maybe the tension between a more universalist worldview and religion that is not tied to landscape, is much broader in its cosmology?
00:32:12
Speaker
versus, you know, again, I'm thinking of, you know, Christianity entering an area where it has all these traditions, but is more associated with personal salvation, a word from outside, not necessarily as local. Is it that kind of a dynamic, maybe? Oh, yeah, absolutely. One of the things that happens is we go from, I mean, with Islam, we go from a
00:32:41
Speaker
group of people who are worshiping tutelary deities, tribal deities, deities of place to a universal monotheism that is at least theoretically binding on all people at all times.
00:32:56
Speaker
right right and so at that and and and the jinn are fascinating because they become incorporated into this uh one of the things that is um very interesting to me is that in islamic lore uh the devil iblis and the devils the shaitan are not fallen angels that fall in jinn huh
Iblis and Fallen Angel Comparisons
00:33:23
Speaker
angels can't fall. Angels are in perfect accord with God so they don't have free will so they can't fall. So they don't acknowledge the I guess it's a Gnostic text where there was the battle in heaven and a third of the angels fell or
00:33:42
Speaker
No one knows. That's how to think of them. That's there in some rabbinical traditions. It's there in some of the Gnostic texts, but it's not an Islamic. It doesn't mean that Islam has incorporated into its story. They don't need that. There is a time at the beginning where, and this actually parallels a different rabbinic text, where God creates Adam out of clay.
00:34:12
Speaker
And he asks the angels and jinn to bow to Adam, his new creation. And the angels do so because they're in perfect accord with God's will. And Iblis, who is to the jinn what Adam was to humans, refuses to bow because he's made of fire, smokeless fire at that. And this thing is made of clay. And so again, it's out of his pride
00:34:42
Speaker
He then cuts himself off from God, and his goal is sort of to prove himself right by seducing humans away from God, and thus proving to God that he was right all along. These people are unworthy of him. So he's kind of a Lucifer figure. He's very much a Lucifer figure. He's very interesting. It also reflects the free will that these beings have, having the ability to say no to God.
00:35:12
Speaker
Right. Exactly. And you have to have that ability to say no to God. That's the essence of free will and the Shaitans are the Jin who have turned away from God as opposed to Jin who follow God. And then you've got
00:35:32
Speaker
You can have a priest from either group. You can have jinn shaitans that don't seem to have very much power. They just kind of whisper at you. And then you can have jinn, if shaitans that are, haunt your house and do terrible things to you and have to be cast out by a sheikh or a czar practitioner. So, I mean, I have to ask this question because we're talking about they can either follow God or reject God. Are there atheists, jinn?
00:36:03
Speaker
That's a good question. There are many gin stories where the question of whether you're good or not doesn't come up, except that usually they will at least use phrases. And this is one of the things that's fascinating. Now, if Leila, all the gin are sort of very cosmopolitan, and if you release them, the first thing they'll do is praise God. But they don't always act good.
00:36:28
Speaker
so they may say they may say the right phrases but they're not always uh they're not they're clearly not always doing god's will and so in that sense too they're like humans i think that's very interesting the whole concept of this the human-esque gen i think it's not something that you really see i feel like it's not something that you really see in other kind of religious fairy tales for lack of a better term where it's
00:36:57
Speaker
You know, they're either evil or they're good. They're very rarely ambiguous like this. Even though there's a lot of parallels between the djinn and the fae, again, the fae are usually split into what, sea and unsealy? Sealy and unsealy? Well, in some traditions they are. In others, they are actually the middle ground you're looking for. When you mentioned the third throne L, one explanation for fairies is to say,
00:37:24
Speaker
it's basically they're the ones that were sort of, and I'm not certain about this. And then they get tossed out. And they're often very, they're trickstery. So they're, they're more
00:37:36
Speaker
good and bad, but not like really aligning either way. Whereas Mark is really talking about something where it's like people, some are really over here and some are really over here and some are sort of in the middle. Whereas generally with fairies and fae versus straight up demons, a lot of them are just in the middle. Right. And they don't really pretend to not be. No, not much, except for maybe to screw with you. Right, exactly. Right.
00:38:02
Speaker
And in in you were talking about movies earlier and in some Middle Eastern movies about gin.
Jhin in Middle Eastern Cinema
00:38:10
Speaker
There are very real issues with are they good or are they bad? There's a there's a gin film that's very much about gin not genies in which a gin falls in love with a woman. And he haunts her home.
00:38:31
Speaker
And he is trying to, he wants her to fall in love and marry him. There's a Quranic or an admonition in the hadith that says that you should not, humans should not marry Jim.
00:38:50
Speaker
And she is trying to abide by that, although she finds herself attracted to him. He is trying to seduce her, and he's got these evil, chitanic members of his family who are telling him to just take her. But he wants love, and so he occupies this very interstitial category as he haunts her home.
00:39:20
Speaker
Well, you had mentioned incubus and succubus earlier. Is there any of that sort of nocturnal assault tradition, which gets tied into the Mara, the nightmare, the sleep paralysis sort of thing with Jin?
00:39:35
Speaker
Yes, not as dramatic as something like an incubus or succubus, but there's certainly the idea that gin can haunt your home. And they can do it for any number of reasons. They can do it because you've committed some grave sin and that's made an opening for them to be able to enter. But some people believe that gin can just come into, especially interstitial spaces, liminal spaces in your home, like the basement or the bathroom.
00:40:04
Speaker
I saw that, that was really, yeah, no, I want no part of that, none. Well, I love that people say prayers before going into their bathroom. I mean, there is a lot you can say about that. Most of it has to do with the can of spray afterwards. I was about to say my bathroom, that's an entirely rational behavior.
00:40:26
Speaker
Or you can just put a little choronic verse above your bathroom and just touch it before you enter. And that has the same effect. I just love that it's the bathroom that is the evil room in the house. I mean, it just tickles me on a very childish level.
00:40:43
Speaker
It's not evil. It's, it's liminal. It's marginal. It's not really a living space, but it's in your living space. A little bit, a little bit of the Mary Douglas there. So yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that that's a huge part of gin. Gin are betwixt in between. Right. They're betwixt in between good and evil. They're betwixt in between the invisible, invisible world. They occupy places that are betwixt in between basements.
00:41:10
Speaker
aren't really part of your house, but they are bathrooms are set aside for one particular purpose. You don't live in the bathroom. You go in there and you come back out.
00:41:25
Speaker
We're not, we're not getting into people's diet, people's other bodily functions, whatever. We're not doing that right now. But even in modern Western horror stories, the basement is a scary place.
Basements and Supernatural Entities
00:41:42
Speaker
Oh yeah, you never go in the basement. You never go in the basement. That's what the weird noise is. I am not going to lie to you. I lived in a house for two years and it was one of those great
00:41:54
Speaker
like tail end of the Victorian era, shot go run. It was a beautiful house. I would not set foot in that basement. And that's where the washer and dryer was. I was like, I will go to a laundry mat. I'm not going in that basement. No. There are all these underworld vibes and it's not quite my house and it's and tends to be darker and danker and there are no windows. It's a terrifying place. There are dead things in that basement. I am not going down there anyway.
00:42:22
Speaker
There was a friend of mine who recently moved out of a place, but before he did, there were all these bizarre, like locked up, nailed up drawers, like dozens of them, which this individual who's not an archaeologist just took a picture. He's like, they must be like metal drawers. And I get down, I start touching things because archaeologists touch things. These are wood. We're totally breaking into these.
00:42:46
Speaker
And we actually found a Friday, a Friday the 13th grocery supplement, like, like a sale thing. And I was able to figure out based on it being a Friday the 13th and sort of the style and what year it was. And then of course, I just then went looked on Zillow and found out when the damn house was built because
00:43:04
Speaker
screw your detective work. But it had been in there from the month they built it, which was actually pretty awesome. But yeah, no, that house also had like somebody's name written in red. It wasn't blood. It wasn't, you know, and like a ring in the fireplace. No, something horrible happened.
00:43:22
Speaker
That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, really bad interior decorations. Yeah, or it just needs to like be blessed by a priest and then like fold it up on itself. Almost certainly, and almost certainly as we will deal with, I think on the podcast before Halloween, it was built on the site of an Indian marriage. It had to be. Well, the funny thing is, even the part of town it's in, I'm not saying anymore, but you may not be wrong.
00:43:52
Speaker
Uh...
00:43:54
Speaker
So just don't go into the world. Jeff also could be an asylum, you know? Well, why don't we go to break? And when we come back, I have, I have one or two things I want to ask you about. And one of these does tie into archaeology and the other does tie into crazy, crazy bullshit. So it's eminently perfect for this show. We always get there. We always get to the crazy bullshit. Yes.
00:44:25
Speaker
I'm Jessica Equinto, and I'm the host of the Heritage Voices podcast. Heritage Voices focuses on how CRM and heritage professionals, public employees, tribes, and descendant communities can best work together to protect their heritage through tribal consultation, collaborative ethnography, and indigenous archaeology. Now back to the show.
00:44:50
Speaker
And we are back and we are still talking with Mark Allen Peterson. And Jubb, you have a funny story you want to tell us.
00:44:57
Speaker
Well, I have a couple of questions for Mark, but before I do, I just wanted to mention I recently went and spoke to a very great audience at the Miami Valley Astronomical Society in Dayton about the kinds of things we talk about on this show. And there was a great question in the answer, lots of great questions and answers afterwards. And one of the questions was, have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect? And I had to calm myself and go,
00:45:26
Speaker
I'm a co-host on the show, Archaeological Fantasies, and if you go look up our cryptozoology episode, there's a rant that has become somewhat infamous about the Mandela Effect, and you all were there, so I just won't say anything before. I just thought you might find that amusing. Anyway, back to our topic on hand.
00:45:48
Speaker
Mark, I wanted to ask, so we've been talking about this sort of liminal and how jinn are sort of between kind of like God and angels and humans and this sort of interstitial and they show up in interstitial places.
Jhin and Ancient Structures
00:45:59
Speaker
And in the book I won't mention the name of again, I've been discussing, and we did this on our fairies episode, about the idea that around the world, and I do kind of lump gin in on this,
00:46:11
Speaker
When you have archaeological things, ruins, but also other things that don't necessarily have an identity of recent building, these things often get attributed to extra humans, to people that are not human, but very human-like. And again, I think that applies to the Janas we've been talking about. We've been talking about ruins, we've talked about pyramids, haunted houses, the temple, all these sorts of things. We've also mentioned
00:46:40
Speaker
the Seal of Solomon, and I know there's this idea, and you sort of alluded to this, and this gets very much in the Western tradition, of objects that can trap gin and whatnot, but are there, I'd like to talk about that a little, but before we do, are there any archaeological or other kinds of objects that get attributed to gin that are not big buildings?
00:47:02
Speaker
They can, I mean, sometimes grottos or particular caves will be said to have been, they're not natural, they were created by gin. Okay. But mostly it's monumental things that it's inconceivable that humans could have raised these vast things that must have been gin. Although I've also, someone was telling me about a spring and that essentially,
00:47:29
Speaker
Someone had bound, maybe, Solomon, had bound gin to pump eternally. And so the reason this spring continues to operate is because there's these poor gin trapped down there who apparently are not afraid. They're stuck with, you know, sort of normal human strength. And so they're just operating this pump manually for eternity. Very unpleasant job. And what that captures is the fact that, you know, for
00:47:59
Speaker
Middle Eastern sorcery and magic, much of it is done through the enslavement of gin. And the tying of knots is a particular, within incantations and so on, is a particular kind of magic that's done to control gin. So they can be somehow captured or dealt with through the tying of complex knots. There's a
00:48:28
Speaker
understanding that jinn can be captured and trapped in rings or other vessels abound to them in some way and then you can control them accordingly and you can go online and you can you can buy rings. Well in the article they were talking about how there were I want to say this is pronounced seek
00:48:52
Speaker
Which kind of threw me, because as I understand, Sikhs, they don't... I don't know anything about Sikhs, but they don't do this. But anyway, they're basically, they sound like shaman who have a...
00:49:05
Speaker
companion djinn that they then employ to go help them find archaeological sites and then when they find the site they use that djinn and magic to combat the guardian djinn that are there or the guardian spirits that are there and then clear out all the magic and all the evil djinn so that the guys can go and meet the site.
00:49:28
Speaker
Right. No, that's that makes perfect sense. I mean, if I'm a Pharaoh, I'm going to bind Jin to guard my tomb. And if I'm a tomb robber, I'm not going to go
00:49:42
Speaker
face a supernatural foe unless I have some kind of a weapon to face that supernatural foe with. We absolutely should be talking about this in the podcast. Yeah, I want to find a word so I can spell it so that I don't sound as cold. Yeah, it looked like sheik or something like that. It looked like sheik but I'm just like, there's no way it's pronounced sheik. Yeah, well, it's sheik and the thing is, yeah, a sheik
00:50:07
Speaker
A sheikh can mean a lot of things in different, in ordinary, I mean, it can be a person of authority in a, I don't know, five, it can be the person who leads the prayer at a mosque. It can be a local person of authority in a small village community. Anyone who has a kind, who commands certain kinds of authorities can be called a sheikh.
00:50:37
Speaker
Yeah, and if I have a, if I have a gin, people are gonna call me a shake. And that's what they were saying in their article here, yeah. Yeah, I've got the authority to command a gin, I'm a shake. So, all right. The question, and I'd like to ask it on the podcast is, so there, the gin are not, there's not a taxonomy of discrete categories of different kinds of gin, or is there?
00:51:06
Speaker
Okay, well, so I was deeply misled by Dungeons and Dragons when I was a kid. Okay, that's of course the line I jumped back in on. And we will talk about this intersection on you didn't make it in this podcast. There's a very clear, they do have a gin and they have this very clear sort of genealogy and they tie them to elements.
00:51:28
Speaker
I was Blake Smith, I would have said a genealogy. I'm glad you're not Blake Smith. Somehow you managed to get it in there. No, there really isn't a classic typology. In fact, it gets really weird when you start talking about ghosts because
00:51:53
Speaker
When people want to talk about a ghost, they'll use the term jinn or efreet. So there's a movie, an Egyptian movie, and it uses the word jinn, but it's very clear in the movie that this jinn is actually the ghost of the man's first wife. And she keeps interfering with his life.
00:52:21
Speaker
I want to watch half of these movies you describe in your article now, though. I went to look up the one. I typed in the Arabic name and my computer was like, no. And then I realized it's translated Talisman. And I'm like, OK, I'll look that up later. But yeah, I want to see that one now. You can't find these. That's a real problem.
00:52:43
Speaker
I had a grad student who took my daughter and I in 2005 into this part of town, a fairly, you know, working class part of town where they had these studios where they made copies of old movies and they moved them from film to videotape to CDs, which is also where I bought all of the still photos.
Preserving Jhin Myths in Film
00:53:12
Speaker
And it was, I don't know, we went there like 10 o'clock at night in order to be able to meet. And I still don't completely understand what was going on, but it was great. And I managed to get a hold of, I mean, they sat there literally and found videotapes and gave me tea while they ran prints, digitalized and ran prints of these old movies. It's a bootlegging operation.
00:53:41
Speaker
Yes, and no, it's in many cases for some of these older movies. It's not clear who has title anymore. It's a way of preserving them. So I mean, we'll go with that story. We'd like to thank Dr. Peterson for coming on to the show with us.
00:54:06
Speaker
Check the show notes for more information on Dr. Peterson's research and other fun articles about gin in the media and in modern culture. We apologize for the slight technical difficulty there at the end, but we hope everyone enjoyed the show, and if you have any questions, you can always contact us at archifantasys at gmail.com.
00:54:26
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:54:47
Speaker
at archaeophantices at gmail.com. You can follow the podcast at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash archaeophantices. You can follow the blog at www.archaeophantices.com and get updates on Tumblr and Twitter at archaeophantices. You can also look for us on Facebook. If you're looking for the show notes for this episode, go to the podcast website at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash archaeophantices.
00:55:36
Speaker
Thanks again for listening.