September 8, 2020 • 39 mins
The djinn may be everywhere but like us, they have their favorite haunts too. Find out where you can find them.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky. I love
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to smell good, and I have been kind of obsessed
with smelling nights since I was about thirteen years old,
and I'm happy to say this was well before the
advent of acts body spray. Now you might not be aware,
but perfumes that are filled with alcohol aren't very popular
in many parts of the world, including where our family
hails from, Pakistan. Instead, scented oils called out there have
(00:52):
been used widely for thousands of years by people in Africa,
the Middle East, and South Asia. And our family was different.
My parents had tiny, little precious vials of the rich
perfumed oil tucked away here and there in a dresser
drawer in the glove compartment of my dad's pickup truck.
Some were clear, others had a dim golden color, and
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some were a deep amber, viscous and thick, sealed tightly
like a treasure. And they were treasures because real, authentic
other is very very expensive, costing in the thousands for
a single ounce of the really good stuff. It's pure,
unadulterated essence, with no alcohol, no dilution of the deeply
heady scents captured inside every drop. It's so strong that
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you can smell the essence even when the vials are sealed.
A drop on each wrist, maybe one behind an ear
would last all day. I never dared to steal any
drops because there would be no hiding it. The scent travels,
turning you into a walking incense stick, and the minute
you enter a room wearing some others will immediately know.
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And also, my siblings and I were strictly forbidden from
wearing other and not because it was expensive. We were
forbidden because See, the set doesn't just draw other people
to you, It draws creatures that we can't even see
to it, especially outside and especially at nighttime. So our
elders told us to be wary of going out at
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night when the gin were most active heavily perfumed, because
it could prove irresistible to them. After all, the gin
lurked everywhere in the darkness, and smelling sweet and inviting,
could be just the thing that captured their interest. On
the other hand, you also don't want to piss them off.
You don't want to anger them, which you could if
you disrespected them. By doing something so heinous as urinating
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under a tree at night, because that's why you find
a lot of them, or at least that's where they
can find you under a tree at night. It said
that many jin live in trees peacefully, not bothering anyone,
unless they could distract did by a sweetly perfumed person
passing by or a rude interloper who decided to relieve
their bladder there. According to Jewish lore, demon gin are
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especially dangerous around palm trees, and you are bound to
invite their attention by sleeping under a palm tree or
squeezing between two palms, or between a palm tree and
a wall. The general rule here is definitely just stay
away from palm trees, also from sword trees because at
least sixty demon gin live in its shade, but also
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avoid the caper bush because the blind demon roof lives there.
And while you're at it, stay away from the roots
of trees because an entire other species of demon gin
are found there. Trespassing into gin territory is enough to
make a gin follow you all the way home, snatch
you right up so you disappear forever, or even possess you,
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so beware of lingering under trees at night for any reason,
because while it might seem like the Gin only occupy
far away ends, the bad news or good news, depending
on how you feel about all this, is that you'll
find them both far and very very near. I'm Robbia Chadary,
and I'll be your guide into the ancient world of
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the hidden Gin. Welcome. As we've noted before, while we
may share our physical world with the Gin, it's not
their only abode. As metaphysical beings, they live in multiple dimensions,
occupying both their own gin worlds and the human one too.
(04:38):
But let's start at the beginning, the original dwelling of
our fiery friends, the Mountain of GoF It's not unusual
that people have historically believed in mystical, powerful beings living
in the highest of peaks, up among the clouds, far
from common human riff raff. For example, the Himalayas have
been revered for thousands of years by Hindus as the
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home and of the gods, a sacred place where ancient
Hindu deities live and love, battle and triumph, where to
this day sages and saints and those seeking salvation trek
to meditate and commune with the divine, and the beautiful
slopes are dotted with sacred caves and shrines. The very
sins of mankind, it said, are forgiven just by laying
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eyes on the mystical mountain range. But while mankind can
actually lay eyes on it, we aren't quite able to
see the esoteric deities that are believed to live there
upon its summits from time immemorial. They are there, but
not for our naked eyes to witness. Similarly, the Greek gods,
when sought, are said to be found atop Mount Olympus,
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the highest mountain in Greece, and the ancient Persian god
of light Mithra rules from atop the sacred mount Hokkaraiah
and other Persian gods, saints, and heroes find rest in
the mount Elbows, range, mountains and mountain ranges, as you
can see, figure heavily in many diverse mythologies and religions,
and the Gin story is no different. If the Gin
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had a homeland, it was Mount Golf, sometimes referred to
as a single mountain and other times as a range.
Golf is a place so mystical that it is both
everywhere and nowhere at least nowhere human experience can find
and place it. The mountain stands at the most distant
point on the Earth, on the very edge of it,
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and those who say it's a range say that it
surrounds the entire planet while remaining invisible to the eye.
Every visible mountain range on Earth, however, springs from Golf,
connected deep underground to the original mother mountain where the
natural and the supernatural meat. Golf itself is created out
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of green gems, some say emeralds, others say para dot,
and among its gleaming peaks and valleys you find jinnis
Than the land of the Jinns. Jennis Than is the
entire region spanning Golf, and in the regions are kingdoms
and tribes, cities and villages spanning thousands of metaphysical miles.
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According to the legends, two such cities are Jibulka and Jibulsa,
both made out of pure emerald, one to the east
and one to the west of Golf. It is said
that Alexander the Great set out to find these cities,
which can only be reached by trekking four months in
utter darkness, but he gave up the riches of Jibulka
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and Jabulsa were not to be his, and how could
they be. He was seeking what he could never find,
attempting to cross into a realm that remains out of
human reach and human sense, far on the other side
of a cosmic divide. While you will likely never make
a took off if you're seeking to find the gin,
no worries because on this side of the mystical mountain,
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right here in the earthly realm, there is no dearth
of where they can be found. The most beastly ones,
as we've meant and before, hot places of desolation, deserts
and caves, abandoned ruins, graveyards. But then there are jin
who prefer not to learn so far from humanity, and
they make it their business to stay close to the sacred.
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If you want to find a gin, go visit a shrine.
In two thousand and six, an unnamed correspondent from the
Economist did just that, going in search for them in
Somalia and Abrahanistan. The correspondent noted that it was often
village women of little or no education that visited the
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shrines with their pleas and prayers. The shrines, it was reported,
are often little more than a carved niche in a
rock with colorful prayer flags tied to nearby trees, and
according to the author quote Genner is that to be
attracted to the ancient geography of shrines, many of which
pre date Islam, and as some have it, the shrines
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were attracted to the Gin, which takes us to one
of them. Most famous such shrine located in the Land
of one hundred thousand Saints, Morocco. That's where you'll find
the shrine of the saint ben Yeffu, also known as
the Sultan of the Gin. Saints in this part of
the world, like saints in most part of the world,
are replete with their miraculous powers to heal the sick,
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fight drought and famine, and plagues men's rifts, and fight
oppressive rulers. Everyday, people pray to them, beseech them for
their assistance in big and small matters, and often hang
all their hopes for help on these human vessels of
divine power. Ben Yeffo, a saint from centuries ago, was
no different. It's hard to be exactly sure when Ben
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yeff Who lived, but historic documents place him sometime between
the eighth and fourteen centuries, a rather considerable span of
time because written local histories were not nearly as common
as oral ones, and from many of the saints of
this region. All that remained behind as proof of their
existence are the folk stories about out them and the shrines.
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The legend goes that ben Yeffi's family had moved from
the Sahara Desert to Marrakesh, Morocco, where in one part
of the city a powerful jin called an Afrit haunted
a spring of water, and this gin would harm anyone
who tried to access the spring. Thanks to the terror
of the jin, the locals were always struggling for water
and food, not even being able to supply sufficient water
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for their herds or their fields. They tried everything they
could to appease the gin during feasts and his honor,
and even sacrificing a virgin here and there to make
peace with the beast, but nothing worked, and year after
a year they suffered. Finally, the tribesmen begged the great
saints of the area to rid them of the gin,
and they were told that only ben Yeffu could help them,
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So they summoned ben Yefu, who addressed an assembly of
all the local saints, who is the supreme spiritual leader
in our times? Ben Yeff, who asked them you are?
They replied, who is the supreme helper? Benieff Wu then demanded,
you are, said the gathering of saints, Then you give
me permission to master Jin's by treading upon them with
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my foot and whipping them with the sword of Jin's.
The saints responded, you have our permission, and promised that
neither we nor our descendants would advance in front of
you or your progeny to face Jin's till Allah inherits
the earth and all its inhabitants. Upon hearing that, ben
Yeff who approached the spring and summoned the Jin, who
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jumped out at him in the shape of a lion.
But before the line could touch him, ben Yeff, who
blew on it, turning the animal into a roaring flame
that reached the sky but then quickly burned out. Ben Yeff,
who having been endowed all the Jin controlling power by
the other saints, moved from place to place during his
life and eventually settled in Dahkula with his followers, where
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they built a shrine which exists to this day in
his decades of saintly miracle's. Benyeffu became known for a
particular miracle, the ability to draw water out of dry
barren land, which was certainly useful in those parts. But
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it wasn't his power of divination that resulted in a
legacy that has lasted centuries, if not a millennia. It
was instead his legendary defeat of a mysterious figure known
as a Black Sultan. Now, in stories from this region,
the Black Sultan wasn't only destroyed once by ben Yeffu,
he was destroyed at numerous times by different saints. Anthropologists
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believed the Black Sultan figure stood for any number of tyrannical,
oppressive rulers that the population felt helpless against, and so
it was the spiritual sultans the saints that rose up
against the material ones, the conquerors and rulers who made
life miserable for their subjects. But there is also another
tradition about the Black Sultan, an even darker one. It
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is said that he in fact the son of shem Haresh,
the demon jinn who stands guard at one of the
entrances to the Palace of Satan. Whether the Black Sultan
was descended from a demon jin or was an actual
oppressive ruler. The legend goes that when ben Yefu moved
into the Decula region, he inadvertently encroached into the Black
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Sultan's territory. The Sultan heard about this powerful saint who
had just arrived, and realized this could mean a serious
challenge to his own power, so he assembled an army
and rode out to meet Benyefu with thousands of soldiers
flanking him. The Sultan demanded that ben yeff Wu leave
the region and never return, but the saint was unperturbed.
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He calmly refused. The Sultan, outraged over the saint's arrogance
and disdain, commanded his army to attack. But what the
Sultan didn't know was that the saint wasn't alone. He
had his own army, an army of Jin under his control.
With barely a movement, Beniyeffu's signaled for his battalions of
Gin soldiers to counter attack. The Sultan's army went flying
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men and horses in the air as a Gin mounted
an all out assault. Some stories say the sultan himself
was lifted off his steed and high into the air.
By a gin with seven heads, where he was suspended
terrified until he conceded, humiliated, and defeated. The Black Sultan
asked ben Yeffu for a truce. The saint agreed, but
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only on one condition that the Sultan sign a decree
declaring ben Yeffu to be a true saint. The Black
Sultan did so and handed Benyeffu the declaration, stating, so
all could hear, I am a Sultan and you are
a Sultan. That episode definitively established benyef whose position as
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a bona fide saint and entitled him to the eternal
honorific the Sultan of the Gin. Benyef who was also
known by another name, the Green Sultan, as a contrast
to the Black Sultan. This name he received when a
man pus that by Jin came to him to be cured.
The afflicted patients saw the saint as a vision of
a knight on a white horse. When ben yeff Who
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lifted his arms in prayer, the sick man's eyes opened
wide as he saw entire tribes of Jin living under
the folds of Benieffu's gown, all bowed to the Green
Sultan in allegiance, and since then, ben jeff Wu's sovereignty
over the Jin has never been challenged. Today, the Shrine
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of ben yeff Who bustles day and night with spiritual healers.
These healers continue the spiritual tradition of their saint battling
evil gin causing harm to human beings, and the shrine
also draws Jin to it who come to aid the
healers or commune with them, or they're just unable to
resist the draw of the power of ben Yeffu himself.
And there is another reason the Jin gather at ben
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yeff Wu, because that's where an assembly of Jin, led
by the spirit of the Saint himself, preside over a
mythic gin core. That's right, a court with judges and
trials and defendants. The shrine at ben Yaffoo is simply designed.
It's a common dome shaped structure encircled by a series
of small cells that hold seekers waiting for relief. They're
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called patients, but they come bearing a most serious spiritual disease,
jin possession, and so as they are exercised by the
spiritual inheritors of the Saint, the healers, the Jins themselves
are put on trial for having transgressed against humankind. The
proceedings in this court, called Jin evictions, involved judges, which
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are usually the healers and sometimes lawyers and witnesses of
both the human and gin variety, and the Jin defendants
are brought before the court through the physical body they
have possessed. The Gin are dragged to this court from
all over the world, because the court at ben Yaffoo
is what you might call the Supreme Court of Jin misbehavior,
the highest ruling body in the world exercising jurisdiction over
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the gin. In one reported instance, a young boy who
was unable to walk was brought to Beniafu by his father,
who carried him into the shrine and placed him before
one of the healers. The father accused the defendant a
gin for his son's affliction. The healer focused his gaze
on the boy, whose body began twisting and writhing in
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pain as prayers began being chanted. The boy suddenly opened
his mouth and started reciting verses in Arabic, but the
healer silenced him, demanding to know who was speaking, the
boy or the gin. The voice that responded said it
was a gin named Knock and that he was a
god fearing jin, not an evil one. Well, why, then,
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asked the healer, did he possess the boy because of
the gin? The boy had entered a cave with the
jin lived and well, he took a leak. What the
boy didn't know was that he had urinated right on
the gin itself. This act of disrespect so enraged the
Gin that he possessed the young man ever since. The
healer reprimanded the gin. Is this any way to treat
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a fellow, god fearing person? Forgive him, he demanded. The
Gin agreed and forgave the boy, releasing him from his bondage.
And immediately the boy rose and stood able to walk again.
The trial of the Gin was over and his eviction secured.
These are the kinds of stories that people witness regularly
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at Beniefu, and it's not uncommon for the offending gin
to cite some kind of wrongdoing against them as a
reason for their taking a sole hostage, which, if we
remember from the top of the show, is one good
reason not to take a leak under a tree, just
like our elders warned us not to, because you never
know who or what you might be leaking on. An
interesting note about the Gin evictions at the Shrine of
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Benieffu is this, while the defendants may except the verdicts
issue to them and release their victims, it doesn't mean
they just go away. Often they will linger at the shrine,
and sometimes they leave one victim only to occupy another.
And every night, they say, the jinns gather to dance
in a trance at the shrine, moving in circle upon
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circle of spiritual ecstasy, honoring their master ben Yeffu and
his power over them. So if you're looking for Gin,
the shrine of ben Yeffu will surely not disappoint. Of course,
ben Yeffu isn't the only shrine you can find gin,
though most shrines certainly don't hold Gin trials. But across
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the world, at shrines both big and small, jinner said
to guard the sacred spaces, often in the form of
human beings that appear and disappear, protectors who live there,
to safeguard pilgrims, and honor whatever saint is buried there.
In some shrines and places of worship, you'll find legions
of pigeons and other birds that line the rooftops and
wander in the courtyards. These birds, they say, are actually
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Jin who come to share the quiet, contemplative peace of
these spaces, who listen to the prayerful chance, and who
harbor no ill will towards human beings. And just as
some Jin guards shrines and worshippers, there are others who
stand guard over an entirely different kind of charge, worldly treasures. Now,
we've mentioned before that Jin often dwell in desolate places,
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among crumbling, abandoned sites. That way, they're far removed from
humanity and can live there in peace. But sometimes the
reason they're living among the ruins is because somewhere in
those ruins, in that far off, lonely place, there is
a hidden treasure that needs guarding. There is an ancient
legend about an awesome treasure concealed in the Nebataean ruins
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in the Hijaz region of present day Saudi Arabia. The
Nebataeans were an Arabian tribe whose earliest inscriptions date hundreds
of years before the birth of Jesus. Some say they
were nomads and traveled throughout the desert with their herds,
following the seasons and food and water supplies. Other sources
say they were a tribe of warriors, numbering in the thousands,
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and they were also master tradesmen, with their trades dry
all the way from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.
The Nabatians faded from history, but left behind grand monuments
to their existence across the region, from modern day Jordans
to Israel to the Sinai and in northwest Saudi Arabia. Now,
many of you may have heard of Petra, the ruins
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of an ancient Nebatian city in Jordan that attracts thousands
of tourists from across the world, but you likely haven't
heard of Madayan Saleh, the second largest nebatinin archaeological site
after Petra, dating back to the first century, and that's
where we find our next story. Madaine sale translates to
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the cities of Saleh, named after an ancient prophet from
before the time of Abraham, whose story is found in
both High and Islamic scriptures. According to the stories, the
prophet Saleh was sent to the Nebatian people of this
region to call them to the true religion, but they
rejected him, and while things didn't go so well for them,
then they were wiped out by God for their impiety
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and arrogance, and since then only their ruins remain. And
it seems, according to the archaeologists, the people of this
region did disappear sometime between four hundred and six d
left behind with the vestiges of a once sprawling, dynamic
metropolis with residential communities, places of worship, a hundred thirty wells,
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and four separate necropolis areas to bury and honor the dead.
There are over two thousand burial sites deep within the earth,
and above ground there are monumental tombs. While the land
is arid and flat, massive rose colored sandstone formations rise
up thousands of feet high from the desert, and centuries ago,
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the Nebataeans carved a hundred and thirty one monumental tombs
into these rocky outcrops, which still stand today. The legend
goes the people of the region did just leave behind
these monuments, They also left behind a grand treasure sealed
in one of the thousands of rocky chambers underground, a
treasure so great that, if found, the kings of the
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world would battle over it. Tribes would destroy one another,
friend would turn against friend, and brother against brother, and
such a grand treasure, of course, cannot stand unguarded, protecting
it since the time the inhabitants were wiped out. Is
a gin, and not just any gin, but an ancient,
if freat Now the Freath are known to be powerful, wicked,
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and cunning. They're winged and massive, and are usually found
in places like Made and Sale, deep among the ruins,
where they rise to from the underworld. Some say they're
demons and they are nearly impossible to control or defeat.
Your best bet is to steer clear of them, which
is what the Arabs of the region did for centuries.
The ruins and Madie and Sale were left unattended for
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hundreds of years, avoided precisely because of low goals, feared
the jin that haunted them, and yet still they stayed
incredibly well preserved. Some say thanks to the arid climate,
and others say thanks to the jin that dwell there.
In two thousand and eight, the site was declared a
UNESCO Heritage Site, and while today the Saudi government highly
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encourages tourism there, many locals still refused to visit. They
know seeking treasure there could end up being fatal for them,
because despite the lure of a buried treasure. At the
end of the day, no one wants to battle a
demon for it. Now, another legendary treasure, guarded by Jin
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is said to be buried in the ruins of the
last city of Ubar, dubbed the Atlantis of the Sands
by Lawrence of Arabia himself. While stories of Ubar can
be found in both Islamic lore and the tales from
one thousand and one Arabian Nights, many scholars thought it
never existed. That was until when the ruins of a
fortress was located by an unlikely team of Los Angeles
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archaeologists who used satellite imagery from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and found something in the most barren part of the
country of Oman, in a region so desolate it's called
the Empty Quarter. The fortress they found was surrounded by
eight walls, an impenetrable octagon. Each wall was sixty ft long,
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twelve feet high and two ft thick and thirty feet high.
Watch towers stood in every corner. It was the watch
towers that convinced the archaeologist that this was indeed Ubar,
because it matched the description in the Islamic scripture that
gore On which referred to Ubar as the quote the
many towered city whose like has not been built in
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the entire land. If this was indeed the ancient city
of Ubar, that means the researchers had found what was
the center of the global frankin since trade over three
thousand years ago, and thanks to that trade. Legend has
it that the rulers of Ubar were rich and powerful
beyond imagination. According to the legend, they were ruled over
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by a brutal king named Shahdad bin Odd. King Shaddad
ruled over a thousand tribes, and he was obsessed with
creating a paradise for himself on earth, so he ordered
gems and jewels from around the world to be used
in building a city that would be his own paradise
on Earth. Ubar was filled with pillars of rubies and emeralds,
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thresholds of pearls, walls of gold and silver, the entire
place lush and fragrant, from floors studied with saffron and musk,
dotted with exotic gardens that invoked all the beauty of
a heavenly paradise. Unfortunately, for Shahdad, he never was able
to see the fortress completed in all of its glory.
It said that when Shahdad finally headed out to inspect
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the city after it took three hundred years to make,
and in case you're wondering, Shadad himself was a nine
years old. His arrogance finally caught up to him for
the sin of trying to recreate God's paradise on earth,
along with plenty of other sins like greed and debauchery.
Shaddad and his entourage were swallowed up by a massive
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desert storm, as was his jeweled city. But while the
treasures ended up buried under mountains of sand and earth,
they weren't forgotten. For thousands of years, those treasures have
been guarded by the gin creatures called the Nisnas. Strangely
half formed, the Nisnas could be mistaken for human at
a distance, but upon getting closer, the illusion disappears. With
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half ahead, half a body, a single eye, the Nisnas
hop around on a single foot attached to their only leg.
While they are considered a weak gin without much power,
their misshapen form terrifies the imagination of believers from the
east to the west. They even make an appearance in
the French writer Gustave Flaubert's literary work The Temptation of St.
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Anthon me In this book, the saint, who has isolated
himself on an Egyptian mountaintop, is tested by visions, haunted
by gods and demons, tempted by magicians and monsters, and
one of those monsters is the Nisnas slobear rights. The
nisnas have only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg,
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half a body, half a heart. They say, we live
quiet in our halves of houses, with our halves and wives,
and our halves of children. The nisnas may have limitations
to their powers, but they are able protectors of their charge.
If any human gets too close to the treasure, they
summon a sandstorm to blind and disorient them, And if
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they keep going, the nisnas don't allow them to escape
the desert until they've gone completely mad. And so it's
these halflings that still guard the treasure of Ubar today,
wherever they may be buried. For some, that's enough to
avoid even looking for the treasure, but for others, the
jinn themselves are the keys to the fortune. In two
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thousand and twelve, a piece published in the Journal of
Archaeology recounts story written by an author named Salah al
Hudaliyah about an extraordinary discovery that he made in the
country of Jordan. In Salah had been visiting relatives who
introduced him to a young man that was engaged in
some questionable behavior. This man told Salah that he was
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a treasure hunter. He dug up antiquities from archaeological sites,
which wasn't exactly legal and that concerned Salah, but his
concern only grew when the young man told him he
had help in his adventures. His partner in crime was
a Jinn that pointed him to exactly where he could
find buried treasure. Salah was understandably skeptical, to which the
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young man responded, this is my problem. No one believes me.
So Sala agreed to go along with the man the
next day to see if there was indeed any evidence
of a Jin working with him. They made three stops
during their excursion at different points a cave, a collection
of large rocks, and a tree, and at every point
Sala was directed by the young man to find a
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hidden object objects he said that the Jin was locating
for him. Sala discovered a ragged old document in the cave,
shards of pottery under the rocks, and an old piece
of fabric inside a hole in the tree. All the items,
to Salah at least looked to be years old. These
were not recently placed. The document, according to the Jin
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guiding the young man, was a witchcraft spell meant to
lead them further on in their search. At that point,
Sala felt a deep sense of discomfort. He decided to
abandon ship and he left, but he couldn't stop thinking
about the experience, and over a decade later, in two
thousand and three, he returned to interview more antiquities looters,
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but this time in Palestine. For the following seven years,
he interviewed hundreds of them and found a significant number
that admitted to engaging Gin to help find treasure. He
was told that there were two kinds of treasures, those
that were considered normal, that they were left behind in
the usual course of human business, and then there was
a second category treasure that was under the protection of Gin.
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And to get to that treasure, well, you kind of
needed supernatural help, but that help always came at a price.
In order to be given the exact location of a
valuable hidden object. The treasure hunters were commanded by the
Gin that they asked for help from to perform some
rather profane acts, including washing themselves with wine, drinking blood,
(31:44):
and even offering a human sacrifice on an altar. In
some cases, the treasure hunters had to subject themselves to
being tortured physically by the Gin in order to gain
access to their secrets. Others reported they agreed to be
possessed by the Gin, and sometimes that Gin didn't want
to let go now. In most cases, though, the Gin
(32:04):
couldn't be accessed without the aid of a chief, a
cleric that proclaimed to have the knowledge and power needed
to summon and control them all for a fee, of course,
or a cut of whatever treasure was found. And this,
of course leaves the door wide open for con men
of all stripes. In two thousand and seventeen, the Golf
(32:25):
News media outlet reported an incredible story. A family in
Debay was approached by a woman who told them that
she sensed there was a vast hidden treasure under their
property and she knew just the man who could help
the family find and extract the treasure. They agreed to
meet him, and when he arrived, he began digging in
a portion of their yard, and right before their stun dies,
(32:47):
he pulled jewelry out of the earth. He quickly reburied it,
though telling them that this jewelry and much other treasure
lay beneath the ground, but it was guarded by a
powerful gin. At that gin was not happy that he
had dug up the jewels without the gin's permission. In
order to appease the gin, the man told the family
they must make an offering of a special liquid, and
(33:09):
that liquid would cost over two hundred thousand dollars. They
gave the man the money in cash, and of course,
he disappeared. Not long after, they got a call from
a third person who told them that their treasure hunter
had been captured by the gin and was being imprisoned
by it. He told him it would cost another two
thousand dollars to release him. Well. By now the family
(33:31):
was a little bit suspicious, but they agreed to meet
the caller. They handed over the money, but they had
already alerted the police to the scam. The authorities busted
the con men in their fraudulent gin scheme and arrested them.
Then they advised the public to be aware of those
claiming to have contact with or power over the gin. Now,
while the people involved in this caper were certainly a
(33:53):
bunch of crooks, the profession of treasure hunting with the
help of other worldly partners had they long respect double
history in the region. In fact, these professionals even organized
into a formal guild in ninth century Egypt, putting out
Get Rich Quick treasure hunting manuals. The government quickly realized
the economic value of this industry and appointed a supervisor
(34:16):
over the group. Over the next millennia, the historical impact
of looting antiquities finally became apparent, So in the early
twentieth century, the very first Egyptologist, Ahmad Kamal, wrote a
massive tome on the history and impact of antiquity hunting
to try and garner national support for preserving these national treasures.
(34:37):
Perhaps the most fascinating part of that book is an
entire index of gin, over three hundred of them listed
by a name that had assisted the treasure hunters of
the past. So yeah, teaming up the gin in the
hopes of getting rich is a long standing and rich
tradition which takes us back to our antiquity looters in Palestine. Ultimately, Salah,
(35:00):
who conducted an entire research study on antiquity looters that
used the help of Jin, found that it was a
dangerous and unusually fruitless endeavor because more often than not
there was no treasure to be found. But ever, believers
that didn't deter the faith of the hunters in the
existence of ancient buried treasures guarded by Jin. They just
(35:21):
figured the supernatural and super powerful custodians simply moved the
treasures to thwart them from being stolen. After all, what
else would a good guardian do. The Gin can lurk
anywhere and haunt any place they please. Back into thousands,
(35:41):
a newspaper reported a spate of inexplicable seizures among the
teachers at a girls school in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. A
local cleric investigated and determined the seizures were the result
of Jin's inhabiting the place, and in two thousand six,
multiple stories appeared on an Indian news wire about numerous
haunted mosques in the city of Popebal, including a two
(36:04):
year old one that is actually called the Mosque of
the Gin. The area surrounding that mosque is also haunted,
and buildings in the neighborhood have been left abandoned given
over to the gin. Another nearby mosque, called the Hira Mosque,
is built out of pure brilliant white marble, but nearly
no one worships there because they're too terrified according to
(36:24):
local residents. Though the mosque doesn't remain empty because the
gin prey there well in this episode by bringing you
closer to home, because if you're in search of a gin,
you might not be able to get to an ancient
shrine or buried treasure or haunted mosque, but luckily you
don't have to travel to the far reaches of the
globe to find them. You might not even have to
(36:45):
leave home. That's because there are many traditions that say
that jinns who like to stay close to human beings
often do so by staying in their bathrooms. Now, today's
bathrooms aren't exactly like the kinds of toilets that people
have had to make do with over the centry. Our
bathrooms are generally more sanitary and less foreboding, but historically
they were pretty much the least pleasant place a person
(37:08):
might have to visit daily, and because they were often dirty,
and smelly and rarely cleaned. You can be assured it
was one place nothing holy was ever uttered. That's why
it makes sense that these dark, filthy spaces will attract
beings just as dark and unholy. So be careful the
next time you play the Bloody Marry game the bathroom,
(37:29):
you may end up summoning a creature you didn't expect.
Thanks for joining us this week. Next week we'll be
back to take you another step into the world of
the Hidden Gin. Until then, remember we are not alone.
(37:50):
If you loved today's episode, I'm gonna ask you a
big favor. Please stop my iTunes and leave me a
rating and a review, even if it's just one short sentence.
Not only is that how other listeners discover the podcast,
but it's also what keeps the podcast going. And for
every thousand reviews that I get on iTunes, I'll release
another Patreon episode absolutely free. That's right, we're on Patreon,
(38:13):
so if you're a Gin enthusiast, check out the Companion
Patreon series at patreon dot com slash Hidden Jin Again,
that's patreon dot com slash Hidden Gin, and remember Jin
is spelled d j I n N. That's where you're
gonna find an amazing series of interviews between me, scholars, experts, artist, historians,
and every day lay people who have had extraordinary experiences
(38:37):
with jin and everybody can check out the first episode
absolutely free. It's me and my husband sharing our gen
stories and it was a lot of fun. And if
you have any Gin stories, well, I'd love to hear
from you. Email me at the Hidden Gin at gmail
dot com. Once again, it's The Hidden Gin Gin with
a D at gmail dot com and you might just
(38:58):
hear back from me, or you might hear your story
on this show. And finally, don't forget to follow us
on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with
the handle the Hidden Gin. There you can tweet, post, insta,
dm me. I'd love to hear from all of you,
and believe me, I read every single message. The Hidden
(39:21):
Gin is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The podcast is written and
hosted by Robbia Chaudry and produced by Miranda Hawkins and
Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and
Matt Frederick. Music for the show was provided by Smith
Sony and Folkways recordings. Our theme song was created by
(39:44):
Patrick Cortez. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky. I love
(00:30):
to smell good, and I have been kind of obsessed
with smelling nights since I was about thirteen years old,
and I'm happy to say this was well before the
advent of acts body spray. Now you might not be aware,
but perfumes that are filled with alcohol aren't very popular
in many parts of the world, including where our family
hails from, Pakistan. Instead, scented oils called out there have
(00:52):
been used widely for thousands of years by people in Africa,
the Middle East, and South Asia. And our family was different.
My parents had tiny, little precious vials of the rich
perfumed oil tucked away here and there in a dresser
drawer in the glove compartment of my dad's pickup truck.
Some were clear, others had a dim golden color, and
(01:15):
some were a deep amber, viscous and thick, sealed tightly
like a treasure. And they were treasures because real, authentic
other is very very expensive, costing in the thousands for
a single ounce of the really good stuff. It's pure,
unadulterated essence, with no alcohol, no dilution of the deeply
heady scents captured inside every drop. It's so strong that
(01:39):
you can smell the essence even when the vials are sealed.
A drop on each wrist, maybe one behind an ear
would last all day. I never dared to steal any
drops because there would be no hiding it. The scent travels,
turning you into a walking incense stick, and the minute
you enter a room wearing some others will immediately know.
(02:00):
And also, my siblings and I were strictly forbidden from
wearing other and not because it was expensive. We were
forbidden because See, the set doesn't just draw other people
to you, It draws creatures that we can't even see
to it, especially outside and especially at nighttime. So our
elders told us to be wary of going out at
(02:21):
night when the gin were most active heavily perfumed, because
it could prove irresistible to them. After all, the gin
lurked everywhere in the darkness, and smelling sweet and inviting,
could be just the thing that captured their interest. On
the other hand, you also don't want to piss them off.
You don't want to anger them, which you could if
you disrespected them. By doing something so heinous as urinating
(02:45):
under a tree at night, because that's why you find
a lot of them, or at least that's where they
can find you under a tree at night. It said
that many jin live in trees peacefully, not bothering anyone,
unless they could distract did by a sweetly perfumed person
passing by or a rude interloper who decided to relieve
their bladder there. According to Jewish lore, demon gin are
(03:09):
especially dangerous around palm trees, and you are bound to
invite their attention by sleeping under a palm tree or
squeezing between two palms, or between a palm tree and
a wall. The general rule here is definitely just stay
away from palm trees, also from sword trees because at
least sixty demon gin live in its shade, but also
(03:30):
avoid the caper bush because the blind demon roof lives there.
And while you're at it, stay away from the roots
of trees because an entire other species of demon gin
are found there. Trespassing into gin territory is enough to
make a gin follow you all the way home, snatch
you right up so you disappear forever, or even possess you,
(03:51):
so beware of lingering under trees at night for any reason,
because while it might seem like the Gin only occupy
far away ends, the bad news or good news, depending
on how you feel about all this, is that you'll
find them both far and very very near. I'm Robbia Chadary,
and I'll be your guide into the ancient world of
(04:13):
the hidden Gin. Welcome. As we've noted before, while we
may share our physical world with the Gin, it's not
their only abode. As metaphysical beings, they live in multiple dimensions,
occupying both their own gin worlds and the human one too.
(04:38):
But let's start at the beginning, the original dwelling of
our fiery friends, the Mountain of GoF It's not unusual
that people have historically believed in mystical, powerful beings living
in the highest of peaks, up among the clouds, far
from common human riff raff. For example, the Himalayas have
been revered for thousands of years by Hindus as the
(04:59):
home and of the gods, a sacred place where ancient
Hindu deities live and love, battle and triumph, where to
this day sages and saints and those seeking salvation trek
to meditate and commune with the divine, and the beautiful
slopes are dotted with sacred caves and shrines. The very
sins of mankind, it said, are forgiven just by laying
(05:22):
eyes on the mystical mountain range. But while mankind can
actually lay eyes on it, we aren't quite able to
see the esoteric deities that are believed to live there
upon its summits from time immemorial. They are there, but
not for our naked eyes to witness. Similarly, the Greek gods,
when sought, are said to be found atop Mount Olympus,
(05:43):
the highest mountain in Greece, and the ancient Persian god
of light Mithra rules from atop the sacred mount Hokkaraiah
and other Persian gods, saints, and heroes find rest in
the mount Elbows, range, mountains and mountain ranges, as you
can see, figure heavily in many diverse mythologies and religions,
and the Gin story is no different. If the Gin
(06:07):
had a homeland, it was Mount Golf, sometimes referred to
as a single mountain and other times as a range.
Golf is a place so mystical that it is both
everywhere and nowhere at least nowhere human experience can find
and place it. The mountain stands at the most distant
point on the Earth, on the very edge of it,
(06:27):
and those who say it's a range say that it
surrounds the entire planet while remaining invisible to the eye.
Every visible mountain range on Earth, however, springs from Golf,
connected deep underground to the original mother mountain where the
natural and the supernatural meat. Golf itself is created out
(06:47):
of green gems, some say emeralds, others say para dot,
and among its gleaming peaks and valleys you find jinnis
Than the land of the Jinns. Jennis Than is the
entire region spanning Golf, and in the regions are kingdoms
and tribes, cities and villages spanning thousands of metaphysical miles.
(07:09):
According to the legends, two such cities are Jibulka and Jibulsa,
both made out of pure emerald, one to the east
and one to the west of Golf. It is said
that Alexander the Great set out to find these cities,
which can only be reached by trekking four months in
utter darkness, but he gave up the riches of Jibulka
(07:30):
and Jabulsa were not to be his, and how could
they be. He was seeking what he could never find,
attempting to cross into a realm that remains out of
human reach and human sense, far on the other side
of a cosmic divide. While you will likely never make
a took off if you're seeking to find the gin,
no worries because on this side of the mystical mountain,
(07:53):
right here in the earthly realm, there is no dearth
of where they can be found. The most beastly ones,
as we've meant and before, hot places of desolation, deserts
and caves, abandoned ruins, graveyards. But then there are jin
who prefer not to learn so far from humanity, and
they make it their business to stay close to the sacred.
(08:15):
If you want to find a gin, go visit a shrine.
In two thousand and six, an unnamed correspondent from the
Economist did just that, going in search for them in
Somalia and Abrahanistan. The correspondent noted that it was often
village women of little or no education that visited the
(08:35):
shrines with their pleas and prayers. The shrines, it was reported,
are often little more than a carved niche in a
rock with colorful prayer flags tied to nearby trees, and
according to the author quote Genner is that to be
attracted to the ancient geography of shrines, many of which
pre date Islam, and as some have it, the shrines
(08:56):
were attracted to the Gin, which takes us to one
of them. Most famous such shrine located in the Land
of one hundred thousand Saints, Morocco. That's where you'll find
the shrine of the saint ben Yeffu, also known as
the Sultan of the Gin. Saints in this part of
the world, like saints in most part of the world,
are replete with their miraculous powers to heal the sick,
(09:20):
fight drought and famine, and plagues men's rifts, and fight
oppressive rulers. Everyday, people pray to them, beseech them for
their assistance in big and small matters, and often hang
all their hopes for help on these human vessels of
divine power. Ben Yeffo, a saint from centuries ago, was
no different. It's hard to be exactly sure when Ben
(09:41):
yeff Who lived, but historic documents place him sometime between
the eighth and fourteen centuries, a rather considerable span of
time because written local histories were not nearly as common
as oral ones, and from many of the saints of
this region. All that remained behind as proof of their
existence are the folk stories about out them and the shrines.
(10:05):
The legend goes that ben Yeffi's family had moved from
the Sahara Desert to Marrakesh, Morocco, where in one part
of the city a powerful jin called an Afrit haunted
a spring of water, and this gin would harm anyone
who tried to access the spring. Thanks to the terror
of the jin, the locals were always struggling for water
and food, not even being able to supply sufficient water
(10:27):
for their herds or their fields. They tried everything they
could to appease the gin during feasts and his honor,
and even sacrificing a virgin here and there to make
peace with the beast, but nothing worked, and year after
a year they suffered. Finally, the tribesmen begged the great
saints of the area to rid them of the gin,
and they were told that only ben Yeffu could help them,
(10:49):
So they summoned ben Yefu, who addressed an assembly of
all the local saints, who is the supreme spiritual leader
in our times? Ben Yeff, who asked them you are?
They replied, who is the supreme helper? Benieff Wu then demanded,
you are, said the gathering of saints, Then you give
me permission to master Jin's by treading upon them with
(11:11):
my foot and whipping them with the sword of Jin's.
The saints responded, you have our permission, and promised that
neither we nor our descendants would advance in front of
you or your progeny to face Jin's till Allah inherits
the earth and all its inhabitants. Upon hearing that, ben
Yeff who approached the spring and summoned the Jin, who
(11:33):
jumped out at him in the shape of a lion.
But before the line could touch him, ben Yeff, who
blew on it, turning the animal into a roaring flame
that reached the sky but then quickly burned out. Ben Yeff,
who having been endowed all the Jin controlling power by
the other saints, moved from place to place during his
life and eventually settled in Dahkula with his followers, where
(11:55):
they built a shrine which exists to this day in
his decades of saintly miracle's. Benyeffu became known for a
particular miracle, the ability to draw water out of dry
barren land, which was certainly useful in those parts. But
(12:16):
it wasn't his power of divination that resulted in a
legacy that has lasted centuries, if not a millennia. It
was instead his legendary defeat of a mysterious figure known
as a Black Sultan. Now, in stories from this region,
the Black Sultan wasn't only destroyed once by ben Yeffu,
he was destroyed at numerous times by different saints. Anthropologists
(12:38):
believed the Black Sultan figure stood for any number of tyrannical,
oppressive rulers that the population felt helpless against, and so
it was the spiritual sultans the saints that rose up
against the material ones, the conquerors and rulers who made
life miserable for their subjects. But there is also another
tradition about the Black Sultan, an even darker one. It
(13:00):
is said that he in fact the son of shem Haresh,
the demon jinn who stands guard at one of the
entrances to the Palace of Satan. Whether the Black Sultan
was descended from a demon jin or was an actual
oppressive ruler. The legend goes that when ben Yefu moved
into the Decula region, he inadvertently encroached into the Black
(13:21):
Sultan's territory. The Sultan heard about this powerful saint who
had just arrived, and realized this could mean a serious
challenge to his own power, so he assembled an army
and rode out to meet Benyefu with thousands of soldiers
flanking him. The Sultan demanded that ben yeff Wu leave
the region and never return, but the saint was unperturbed.
(13:41):
He calmly refused. The Sultan, outraged over the saint's arrogance
and disdain, commanded his army to attack. But what the
Sultan didn't know was that the saint wasn't alone. He
had his own army, an army of Jin under his control.
With barely a movement, Beniyeffu's signaled for his battalions of
Gin soldiers to counter attack. The Sultan's army went flying
(14:05):
men and horses in the air as a Gin mounted
an all out assault. Some stories say the sultan himself
was lifted off his steed and high into the air.
By a gin with seven heads, where he was suspended
terrified until he conceded, humiliated, and defeated. The Black Sultan
asked ben Yeffu for a truce. The saint agreed, but
(14:25):
only on one condition that the Sultan sign a decree
declaring ben Yeffu to be a true saint. The Black
Sultan did so and handed Benyeffu the declaration, stating, so
all could hear, I am a Sultan and you are
a Sultan. That episode definitively established benyef whose position as
(14:46):
a bona fide saint and entitled him to the eternal
honorific the Sultan of the Gin. Benyef who was also
known by another name, the Green Sultan, as a contrast
to the Black Sultan. This name he received when a
man pus that by Jin came to him to be cured.
The afflicted patients saw the saint as a vision of
a knight on a white horse. When ben yeff Who
(15:07):
lifted his arms in prayer, the sick man's eyes opened
wide as he saw entire tribes of Jin living under
the folds of Benieffu's gown, all bowed to the Green
Sultan in allegiance, and since then, ben jeff Wu's sovereignty
over the Jin has never been challenged. Today, the Shrine
(15:30):
of ben yeff Who bustles day and night with spiritual healers.
These healers continue the spiritual tradition of their saint battling
evil gin causing harm to human beings, and the shrine
also draws Jin to it who come to aid the
healers or commune with them, or they're just unable to
resist the draw of the power of ben Yeffu himself.
And there is another reason the Jin gather at ben
(15:52):
yeff Wu, because that's where an assembly of Jin, led
by the spirit of the Saint himself, preside over a
mythic gin core. That's right, a court with judges and
trials and defendants. The shrine at ben Yaffoo is simply designed.
It's a common dome shaped structure encircled by a series
of small cells that hold seekers waiting for relief. They're
(16:14):
called patients, but they come bearing a most serious spiritual disease,
jin possession, and so as they are exercised by the
spiritual inheritors of the Saint, the healers, the Jins themselves
are put on trial for having transgressed against humankind. The
proceedings in this court, called Jin evictions, involved judges, which
(16:35):
are usually the healers and sometimes lawyers and witnesses of
both the human and gin variety, and the Jin defendants
are brought before the court through the physical body they
have possessed. The Gin are dragged to this court from
all over the world, because the court at ben Yaffoo
is what you might call the Supreme Court of Jin misbehavior,
the highest ruling body in the world exercising jurisdiction over
(16:58):
the gin. In one reported instance, a young boy who
was unable to walk was brought to Beniafu by his father,
who carried him into the shrine and placed him before
one of the healers. The father accused the defendant a
gin for his son's affliction. The healer focused his gaze
on the boy, whose body began twisting and writhing in
(17:18):
pain as prayers began being chanted. The boy suddenly opened
his mouth and started reciting verses in Arabic, but the
healer silenced him, demanding to know who was speaking, the
boy or the gin. The voice that responded said it
was a gin named Knock and that he was a
god fearing jin, not an evil one. Well, why, then,
(17:39):
asked the healer, did he possess the boy because of
the gin? The boy had entered a cave with the
jin lived and well, he took a leak. What the
boy didn't know was that he had urinated right on
the gin itself. This act of disrespect so enraged the
Gin that he possessed the young man ever since. The
healer reprimanded the gin. Is this any way to treat
(18:01):
a fellow, god fearing person? Forgive him, he demanded. The
Gin agreed and forgave the boy, releasing him from his bondage.
And immediately the boy rose and stood able to walk again.
The trial of the Gin was over and his eviction secured.
These are the kinds of stories that people witness regularly
(18:21):
at Beniefu, and it's not uncommon for the offending gin
to cite some kind of wrongdoing against them as a
reason for their taking a sole hostage, which, if we
remember from the top of the show, is one good
reason not to take a leak under a tree, just
like our elders warned us not to, because you never
know who or what you might be leaking on. An
interesting note about the Gin evictions at the Shrine of
(18:44):
Benieffu is this, while the defendants may except the verdicts
issue to them and release their victims, it doesn't mean
they just go away. Often they will linger at the shrine,
and sometimes they leave one victim only to occupy another.
And every night, they say, the jinns gather to dance
in a trance at the shrine, moving in circle upon
(19:05):
circle of spiritual ecstasy, honoring their master ben Yeffu and
his power over them. So if you're looking for Gin,
the shrine of ben Yeffu will surely not disappoint. Of course,
ben Yeffu isn't the only shrine you can find gin,
though most shrines certainly don't hold Gin trials. But across
(19:28):
the world, at shrines both big and small, jinner said
to guard the sacred spaces, often in the form of
human beings that appear and disappear, protectors who live there,
to safeguard pilgrims, and honor whatever saint is buried there.
In some shrines and places of worship, you'll find legions
of pigeons and other birds that line the rooftops and
wander in the courtyards. These birds, they say, are actually
(19:50):
Jin who come to share the quiet, contemplative peace of
these spaces, who listen to the prayerful chance, and who
harbor no ill will towards human beings. And just as
some Jin guards shrines and worshippers, there are others who
stand guard over an entirely different kind of charge, worldly treasures. Now,
we've mentioned before that Jin often dwell in desolate places,
(20:13):
among crumbling, abandoned sites. That way, they're far removed from
humanity and can live there in peace. But sometimes the
reason they're living among the ruins is because somewhere in
those ruins, in that far off, lonely place, there is
a hidden treasure that needs guarding. There is an ancient
legend about an awesome treasure concealed in the Nebataean ruins
(20:35):
in the Hijaz region of present day Saudi Arabia. The
Nebataeans were an Arabian tribe whose earliest inscriptions date hundreds
of years before the birth of Jesus. Some say they
were nomads and traveled throughout the desert with their herds,
following the seasons and food and water supplies. Other sources
say they were a tribe of warriors, numbering in the thousands,
(20:56):
and they were also master tradesmen, with their trades dry
all the way from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.
The Nabatians faded from history, but left behind grand monuments
to their existence across the region, from modern day Jordans
to Israel to the Sinai and in northwest Saudi Arabia. Now,
many of you may have heard of Petra, the ruins
(21:19):
of an ancient Nebatian city in Jordan that attracts thousands
of tourists from across the world, but you likely haven't
heard of Madayan Saleh, the second largest nebatinin archaeological site
after Petra, dating back to the first century, and that's
where we find our next story. Madaine sale translates to
(21:44):
the cities of Saleh, named after an ancient prophet from
before the time of Abraham, whose story is found in
both High and Islamic scriptures. According to the stories, the
prophet Saleh was sent to the Nebatian people of this
region to call them to the true religion, but they
rejected him, and while things didn't go so well for them,
then they were wiped out by God for their impiety
(22:06):
and arrogance, and since then only their ruins remain. And
it seems, according to the archaeologists, the people of this
region did disappear sometime between four hundred and six d
left behind with the vestiges of a once sprawling, dynamic
metropolis with residential communities, places of worship, a hundred thirty wells,
(22:27):
and four separate necropolis areas to bury and honor the dead.
There are over two thousand burial sites deep within the earth,
and above ground there are monumental tombs. While the land
is arid and flat, massive rose colored sandstone formations rise
up thousands of feet high from the desert, and centuries ago,
(22:49):
the Nebataeans carved a hundred and thirty one monumental tombs
into these rocky outcrops, which still stand today. The legend
goes the people of the region did just leave behind
these monuments, They also left behind a grand treasure sealed
in one of the thousands of rocky chambers underground, a
treasure so great that, if found, the kings of the
(23:11):
world would battle over it. Tribes would destroy one another,
friend would turn against friend, and brother against brother, and
such a grand treasure, of course, cannot stand unguarded, protecting
it since the time the inhabitants were wiped out. Is
a gin, and not just any gin, but an ancient,
if freat Now the Freath are known to be powerful, wicked,
(23:34):
and cunning. They're winged and massive, and are usually found
in places like Made and Sale, deep among the ruins,
where they rise to from the underworld. Some say they're
demons and they are nearly impossible to control or defeat.
Your best bet is to steer clear of them, which
is what the Arabs of the region did for centuries.
The ruins and Madie and Sale were left unattended for
(23:57):
hundreds of years, avoided precisely because of low goals, feared
the jin that haunted them, and yet still they stayed
incredibly well preserved. Some say thanks to the arid climate,
and others say thanks to the jin that dwell there.
In two thousand and eight, the site was declared a
UNESCO Heritage Site, and while today the Saudi government highly
(24:18):
encourages tourism there, many locals still refused to visit. They
know seeking treasure there could end up being fatal for them,
because despite the lure of a buried treasure. At the
end of the day, no one wants to battle a
demon for it. Now, another legendary treasure, guarded by Jin
(24:42):
is said to be buried in the ruins of the
last city of Ubar, dubbed the Atlantis of the Sands
by Lawrence of Arabia himself. While stories of Ubar can
be found in both Islamic lore and the tales from
one thousand and one Arabian Nights, many scholars thought it
never existed. That was until when the ruins of a
fortress was located by an unlikely team of Los Angeles
(25:06):
archaeologists who used satellite imagery from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and found something in the most barren part of the
country of Oman, in a region so desolate it's called
the Empty Quarter. The fortress they found was surrounded by
eight walls, an impenetrable octagon. Each wall was sixty ft long,
(25:28):
twelve feet high and two ft thick and thirty feet high.
Watch towers stood in every corner. It was the watch
towers that convinced the archaeologist that this was indeed Ubar,
because it matched the description in the Islamic scripture that
gore On which referred to Ubar as the quote the
many towered city whose like has not been built in
(25:49):
the entire land. If this was indeed the ancient city
of Ubar, that means the researchers had found what was
the center of the global frankin since trade over three
thousand years ago, and thanks to that trade. Legend has
it that the rulers of Ubar were rich and powerful
beyond imagination. According to the legend, they were ruled over
(26:10):
by a brutal king named Shahdad bin Odd. King Shaddad
ruled over a thousand tribes, and he was obsessed with
creating a paradise for himself on earth, so he ordered
gems and jewels from around the world to be used
in building a city that would be his own paradise
on Earth. Ubar was filled with pillars of rubies and emeralds,
(26:31):
thresholds of pearls, walls of gold and silver, the entire
place lush and fragrant, from floors studied with saffron and musk,
dotted with exotic gardens that invoked all the beauty of
a heavenly paradise. Unfortunately, for Shahdad, he never was able
to see the fortress completed in all of its glory.
It said that when Shahdad finally headed out to inspect
(26:54):
the city after it took three hundred years to make,
and in case you're wondering, Shadad himself was a nine
years old. His arrogance finally caught up to him for
the sin of trying to recreate God's paradise on earth,
along with plenty of other sins like greed and debauchery.
Shaddad and his entourage were swallowed up by a massive
(27:14):
desert storm, as was his jeweled city. But while the
treasures ended up buried under mountains of sand and earth,
they weren't forgotten. For thousands of years, those treasures have
been guarded by the gin creatures called the Nisnas. Strangely
half formed, the Nisnas could be mistaken for human at
a distance, but upon getting closer, the illusion disappears. With
(27:38):
half ahead, half a body, a single eye, the Nisnas
hop around on a single foot attached to their only leg.
While they are considered a weak gin without much power,
their misshapen form terrifies the imagination of believers from the
east to the west. They even make an appearance in
the French writer Gustave Flaubert's literary work The Temptation of St.
(27:59):
Anthon me In this book, the saint, who has isolated
himself on an Egyptian mountaintop, is tested by visions, haunted
by gods and demons, tempted by magicians and monsters, and
one of those monsters is the Nisnas slobear rights. The
nisnas have only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg,
(28:21):
half a body, half a heart. They say, we live
quiet in our halves of houses, with our halves and wives,
and our halves of children. The nisnas may have limitations
to their powers, but they are able protectors of their charge.
If any human gets too close to the treasure, they
summon a sandstorm to blind and disorient them, And if
(28:41):
they keep going, the nisnas don't allow them to escape
the desert until they've gone completely mad. And so it's
these halflings that still guard the treasure of Ubar today,
wherever they may be buried. For some, that's enough to
avoid even looking for the treasure, but for others, the
jinn themselves are the keys to the fortune. In two
(29:12):
thousand and twelve, a piece published in the Journal of
Archaeology recounts story written by an author named Salah al
Hudaliyah about an extraordinary discovery that he made in the
country of Jordan. In Salah had been visiting relatives who
introduced him to a young man that was engaged in
some questionable behavior. This man told Salah that he was
(29:33):
a treasure hunter. He dug up antiquities from archaeological sites,
which wasn't exactly legal and that concerned Salah, but his
concern only grew when the young man told him he
had help in his adventures. His partner in crime was
a Jinn that pointed him to exactly where he could
find buried treasure. Salah was understandably skeptical, to which the
(29:56):
young man responded, this is my problem. No one believes me.
So Sala agreed to go along with the man the
next day to see if there was indeed any evidence
of a Jin working with him. They made three stops
during their excursion at different points a cave, a collection
of large rocks, and a tree, and at every point
Sala was directed by the young man to find a
(30:17):
hidden object objects he said that the Jin was locating
for him. Sala discovered a ragged old document in the cave,
shards of pottery under the rocks, and an old piece
of fabric inside a hole in the tree. All the items,
to Salah at least looked to be years old. These
were not recently placed. The document, according to the Jin
(30:39):
guiding the young man, was a witchcraft spell meant to
lead them further on in their search. At that point,
Sala felt a deep sense of discomfort. He decided to
abandon ship and he left, but he couldn't stop thinking
about the experience, and over a decade later, in two
thousand and three, he returned to interview more antiquities looters,
(30:59):
but this time in Palestine. For the following seven years,
he interviewed hundreds of them and found a significant number
that admitted to engaging Gin to help find treasure. He
was told that there were two kinds of treasures, those
that were considered normal, that they were left behind in
the usual course of human business, and then there was
a second category treasure that was under the protection of Gin.
(31:23):
And to get to that treasure, well, you kind of
needed supernatural help, but that help always came at a price.
In order to be given the exact location of a
valuable hidden object. The treasure hunters were commanded by the
Gin that they asked for help from to perform some
rather profane acts, including washing themselves with wine, drinking blood,
(31:44):
and even offering a human sacrifice on an altar. In
some cases, the treasure hunters had to subject themselves to
being tortured physically by the Gin in order to gain
access to their secrets. Others reported they agreed to be
possessed by the Gin, and sometimes that Gin didn't want
to let go now. In most cases, though, the Gin
(32:04):
couldn't be accessed without the aid of a chief, a
cleric that proclaimed to have the knowledge and power needed
to summon and control them all for a fee, of course,
or a cut of whatever treasure was found. And this,
of course leaves the door wide open for con men
of all stripes. In two thousand and seventeen, the Golf
(32:25):
News media outlet reported an incredible story. A family in
Debay was approached by a woman who told them that
she sensed there was a vast hidden treasure under their
property and she knew just the man who could help
the family find and extract the treasure. They agreed to
meet him, and when he arrived, he began digging in
a portion of their yard, and right before their stun dies,
(32:47):
he pulled jewelry out of the earth. He quickly reburied it,
though telling them that this jewelry and much other treasure
lay beneath the ground, but it was guarded by a
powerful gin. At that gin was not happy that he
had dug up the jewels without the gin's permission. In
order to appease the gin, the man told the family
they must make an offering of a special liquid, and
(33:09):
that liquid would cost over two hundred thousand dollars. They
gave the man the money in cash, and of course,
he disappeared. Not long after, they got a call from
a third person who told them that their treasure hunter
had been captured by the gin and was being imprisoned
by it. He told him it would cost another two
thousand dollars to release him. Well. By now the family
(33:31):
was a little bit suspicious, but they agreed to meet
the caller. They handed over the money, but they had
already alerted the police to the scam. The authorities busted
the con men in their fraudulent gin scheme and arrested them.
Then they advised the public to be aware of those
claiming to have contact with or power over the gin. Now,
while the people involved in this caper were certainly a
(33:53):
bunch of crooks, the profession of treasure hunting with the
help of other worldly partners had they long respect double
history in the region. In fact, these professionals even organized
into a formal guild in ninth century Egypt, putting out
Get Rich Quick treasure hunting manuals. The government quickly realized
the economic value of this industry and appointed a supervisor
(34:16):
over the group. Over the next millennia, the historical impact
of looting antiquities finally became apparent, So in the early
twentieth century, the very first Egyptologist, Ahmad Kamal, wrote a
massive tome on the history and impact of antiquity hunting
to try and garner national support for preserving these national treasures.
(34:37):
Perhaps the most fascinating part of that book is an
entire index of gin, over three hundred of them listed
by a name that had assisted the treasure hunters of
the past. So yeah, teaming up the gin in the
hopes of getting rich is a long standing and rich
tradition which takes us back to our antiquity looters in Palestine. Ultimately, Salah,
(35:00):
who conducted an entire research study on antiquity looters that
used the help of Jin, found that it was a
dangerous and unusually fruitless endeavor because more often than not
there was no treasure to be found. But ever, believers
that didn't deter the faith of the hunters in the
existence of ancient buried treasures guarded by Jin. They just
(35:21):
figured the supernatural and super powerful custodians simply moved the
treasures to thwart them from being stolen. After all, what
else would a good guardian do. The Gin can lurk
anywhere and haunt any place they please. Back into thousands,
(35:41):
a newspaper reported a spate of inexplicable seizures among the
teachers at a girls school in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. A
local cleric investigated and determined the seizures were the result
of Jin's inhabiting the place, and in two thousand six,
multiple stories appeared on an Indian news wire about numerous
haunted mosques in the city of Popebal, including a two
(36:04):
year old one that is actually called the Mosque of
the Gin. The area surrounding that mosque is also haunted,
and buildings in the neighborhood have been left abandoned given
over to the gin. Another nearby mosque, called the Hira Mosque,
is built out of pure brilliant white marble, but nearly
no one worships there because they're too terrified according to
(36:24):
local residents. Though the mosque doesn't remain empty because the
gin prey there well in this episode by bringing you
closer to home, because if you're in search of a gin,
you might not be able to get to an ancient
shrine or buried treasure or haunted mosque, but luckily you
don't have to travel to the far reaches of the
globe to find them. You might not even have to
(36:45):
leave home. That's because there are many traditions that say
that jinns who like to stay close to human beings
often do so by staying in their bathrooms. Now, today's
bathrooms aren't exactly like the kinds of toilets that people
have had to make do with over the centry. Our
bathrooms are generally more sanitary and less foreboding, but historically
they were pretty much the least pleasant place a person
(37:08):
might have to visit daily, and because they were often dirty,
and smelly and rarely cleaned. You can be assured it
was one place nothing holy was ever uttered. That's why
it makes sense that these dark, filthy spaces will attract
beings just as dark and unholy. So be careful the
next time you play the Bloody Marry game the bathroom,
(37:29):
you may end up summoning a creature you didn't expect.
Thanks for joining us this week. Next week we'll be
back to take you another step into the world of
the Hidden Gin. Until then, remember we are not alone.
(37:50):
If you loved today's episode, I'm gonna ask you a
big favor. Please stop my iTunes and leave me a
rating and a review, even if it's just one short sentence.
Not only is that how other listeners discover the podcast,
but it's also what keeps the podcast going. And for
every thousand reviews that I get on iTunes, I'll release
another Patreon episode absolutely free. That's right, we're on Patreon,
(38:13):
so if you're a Gin enthusiast, check out the Companion
Patreon series at patreon dot com slash Hidden Jin Again,
that's patreon dot com slash Hidden Gin, and remember Jin
is spelled d j I n N. That's where you're
gonna find an amazing series of interviews between me, scholars, experts, artist, historians,
and every day lay people who have had extraordinary experiences
(38:37):
with jin and everybody can check out the first episode
absolutely free. It's me and my husband sharing our gen
stories and it was a lot of fun. And if
you have any Gin stories, well, I'd love to hear
from you. Email me at the Hidden Gin at gmail
dot com. Once again, it's The Hidden Gin Gin with
a D at gmail dot com and you might just
(38:58):
hear back from me, or you might hear your story
on this show. And finally, don't forget to follow us
on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with
the handle the Hidden Gin. There you can tweet, post, insta,
dm me. I'd love to hear from all of you,
and believe me, I read every single message. The Hidden
(39:21):
Gin is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The podcast is written and
hosted by Robbia Chaudry and produced by Miranda Hawkins and
Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and
Matt Frederick. Music for the show was provided by Smith
Sony and Folkways recordings. Our theme song was created by
(39:44):
Patrick Cortez. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
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