November 3, 2020 • 45 mins
Summoning the djinn is no easy task, but it may be even harder to get rid of them. Spells, rituals, sacrifices - it can take a lot of effort, time, and even money to rid yourself of an unwanted djinn guest.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkey. Listener discretion
is advised. I have five maternal uncles, each one of
(00:32):
them a little bit crazier than the last. One of
these uncles, one of my favorites of the entire group.
In fact, had been engaged to be married half a
dozen times. He had been trying to get married for
nearly fifteen years, but every single time the engagement would
get broken off for some reason or another. Year after
year went by and he could never go from being
(00:53):
engaged to actually getting married. He was in his late thirties,
a point by which he should have been well settled
down with a few kids of his own. And he
was a really nice guy, decent looking, He had his
own plays, had a great job, travel the world. No
one could figure out why he just couldn't seal the deal,
until finally, when he was advised to go see a
(01:15):
local woman known for her supernatural abilities. Maybe he was
told she could figure out what was wrong, and so
he went to her. He dragged a friend along with
him to her tiny, crumbling home on the outskirts of
the city. A little bit nervous about whether what he
was doing was even kosher. He had heard that this
medium healer whatever she was, dealt in black magic, and
(01:39):
that made her dangerous. But he said his prayers and
sucked up his fear because at this point he was desperate.
She was younger than he had imagined, rail thin, sunken eyes,
swaddled up in numerous shawls despite the blazing heat, and
she sat in a small, dusty courtyard on a low
woven seat and motion for my uncle to sit on
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a sheet spread out on the floor in front of her.
She asked him his name, his parents names, and his
date of birth. Then she closed her eyes and mumbled
some prayers. After a very long five minutes or so,
her eyes flew open, and she told my uncle, I
know what's wrong. Someone has done black magic on you.
They've conjured a jin to block your marriage. So every
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time you get close to getting married, this gin interferes
and whispers dark things into your heart or your fiance's heart,
and turns you against each other. The person who did
this magic on you as a woman who wants to
ruin your life, and her name starts with an end.
Now many of the women closest to him, including cousins
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and sister in laws, and even his own mother had
names that started with the letter N. But he had
a feeling he knew exactly who it was, a sister
in law that he didn't trust, and he wasn't about
to let her get away with it. The healer told
him exactly what he needed to do to break the
curse and handed him a list of items he'd have
to retrieve and return to her with along with her fee,
(03:06):
the equivalent of about two U s. Dollars. She also
handed him a small plastic container, which she told him
was a vial of holy water from the spring of
Zum Zum in Mecca. He was to take this vial
and place it under his bed and return with it
and the other things she needed after a week. Seven
days later, he returned to her with all she had
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asked for, hair stolen from the brush of the person
he suspected to have done the black magic, a black
rubber slipper, a basket of dried red chilies, and a
bundle of cash he washed as she placed the hair
on the dirt floor of the courtyard and poured the
holy water over it. Then she took the black rubber
sandal and began slapping the now wet patch on the floor,
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screaming the sister in law's name, and to hell with you,
to hell with you, over and over. My uncle had
never seen anything like it. He was mortified. As she
grew more frenzied, bouncing up and down, slapping the muddy
strands of hair with all her might, until suddenly she
collapsed in silence. After a few minutes, she collected herself
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and emptied the bag of dried chilies on top of
the rubber sandal, which was still laying in the watery
mess she had made. Then she set the little pile
of dried chilies on fire. Now, if you have never
burned dried chilies, the smoke is thick and peppery and choking.
And as this smoke rose, she blew it towards my uncle,
who sat their eyes watering, holding back coughs. He tried
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to get up, but she signaled him to sit back down,
where he suffered until the fire went out and there
was no more smoke left. The healer then gathered up
some of the ashes into a cotton pouch and handed
him to my uncle, telling him to bury them where
no one would find them, and that once they were buried,
the curse would be broken. Now, my uncle told me
this story about a year after all of this had
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taken place, and he laughed as he told did, and
I laughed with him, tears streaming down our faces as
he re enacted how that woman had slapped the black
slipper on the ground over and over, howling for his
sister in law to go to hell. The entire thing
had been ridiculous, he admitted, but he had gone ahead
and buried the ashes even though he was pretty sure
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that the healer was a fraud. But I wasn't so sure, though,
because at the time he told me this, seventeen years ago,
I was visiting Pakistan and we were sitting in our
family home preparing for his wedding. I'm Robbiadrey, and I'll
be your guide into the world of the hidden Gin. Welcome.
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While most gin, you could argue, are busy in their
own lives, going about their gin business, we do know
that business isn't always confined to their own realm. There
are places here on earth with a gin are known
to live and linger ruins and graveyards. But then sometimes
the GIN will decide to take up residence in your residence.
Hollywood has produced dozens of films unhaunted houses, and ghost
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hunters on TV have long entertained us with shaky visuals
of darkened locations, so we are all familiar with what
a potential haunting looks like. The most benign of them
are just the entity making its presence known, like moving
things around, playing little tricks on the residence, or staking
acclaim in a corner of the house as their own.
Believe it or not, I've had such experiences, and while
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I do admit being freaked out, it was mostly just
a nuisance. But there are much more extreme circumstances, of course,
where the Gin are committed to driving out people from
their homes, and they do so by terrifying them in
all sorts of ways. Over the years, I've heard dozens
and dozens of stories about household objects being smashed, doors
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being slammed at all hours of the night, chairs with
people seated in them, being dragged across the room, toilets
and tubs overflowing on their own, and so on and
so forth. And you can witness similar things yourself online.
That is, there are endless YouTube videos of purported house
hauntings and human gin possessions. Entire accounts dedicated to just
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these sorts of things, though I am rather skeptical of
the gin hunters who seem to find them in every
dark house they go into. Forget finding jin, though, it's
getting rid of them. That's a much tougher task, whether
you're exercising them from a place or from a human body.
It's not for the faint of heart, and certainly not
for the lay person, because when the possession is serious,
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most of us are hardly equipped to get into a
fist fight with a gin. Enter the world of gin exorcism,
a realm full of quacks and frauds, but also powerful
spiritual healers that risk their lives to drive out dark
gin from human bodies and abodes. But before they can
exercise a gin, a gin has to first take possession.
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It's believed that there are certain parts of a house
or dwelling that you're most likely to find the gin in,
usually the darkest, dirtiest, or most abandoned parts of a residence,
which is understandable, like the bathroom or a dank basement,
maybe a dusty attic, but the gin are also drawn
to in between places. That's why they're most active in
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this sliver of time between day and night, between dusk
and dawn, and it's also why they lurk under thresholds,
neither inside or out, but just on the boundary, but
also right at the opening openings to a home or
to a room. And similarly, the gin also need openings
into human beings, a crack or vulnerability that will let
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them in, and they have a number of tricks up
their sleeves to get on the inside, as it were.
According to Moroccan lore, a jin can be invited to
possess someone if the victim can be tricked into eating
something called the ahm. In the early part of the
twentieth century, the French artist Aleen R. De Lenz, one
of the first women ever to be admitted to the
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Art School of Paris, moved to Morocco with her husband,
which was at the time colonized by France. Once settled
in her new country, Aleen dedicated herself to the revival
of what she deemed native arts, and herself went on
to create over a hundred paintings and write dozens of
short stories and numerous volumes about the lives of the
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people that she lived among. She was particularly fascinated with
the lives of Moroccan women and their cultural norms and practices,
which are central to many of her writings. De Lenz
died young at the age of forty four in nineteen
twenty five, and shortly after her death, her final book
was published, Practices of Moroccan Harems, Witchcraft, Medicine, Beauty. The
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book was a collection of magical rituals and recipes used
by Moroccan women and healers for almost every issue you
could imagine, including recipes to and I quote, give a
deflowered bride the appearance of virginity, ashore a husband's fidelity,
bring misfortune upon a co wife, augment the size of breasts,
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and for irritated mothers in law, detaching a newly married
son from the two beloved new wife. If a wife
wanted to dominate a marriage, according to this book, all
she had to do was, after being intimate with her husband,
urinate into her cupped hand and then pour the contents
into her unsuspecting husband's tea while reciting this chant, I
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made you drink my water so that you do not
see but by my eyes you do not hear, but
by my ears you do not speak, but by my words.
If a woman wanted her husband to desire her more,
she had to preserve a fresh, plump date inside her
well private regions and then mix it into her husband's food.
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To stop an abusive husband from beating his wife, he
had to be fed soup made with hyena's brains, and
so on and so forth. Among these recipes was the
preparation of the arm, the food that, if eaten, would
cause a person to be controlled in a variety of ways.
The magicians and healers who prepared that the arm claimed
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that it was in fact prepared at the guidance and
direction of the Jinn themselves. The preparation was described in
de Lenz's book like this, The coast coast is rolled
by the hand of the dead, mixed with the crushed
bones of the dead as a fatida, fallen hair reduced
to cinders, powder of dry toronto would have figged finally pulverized.
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This is at the base of all magic drugs administered.
Unknown to the victim. That hand of the dead thing,
by the way, wasn't taken lightly. Local doctors once reported
to de Lend that two women were caught digging up
a grave so that they could steal the hands from
a cadaver and use them to prepare food for one
of their husbands. They weren't trying to get him possessed,
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though the ritual was supposed to have the effect of
a love potion and filled the spouse with endless desire
for his wife. Instead, once the women were caught, the
husband actually divorced the wife. Now, if you want to
cause an actual gin possession, more foul things have to
be added to the base of this concoction. To take
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things further, dung and feces, choice foods of the gin
are added to that the um, resulting in a filthy
mix that no person in their right mind would voluntarily eat,
which is why the victim has to be tricked into
eating it, And that trick involves the person's own personal jin,
the kareen. You'll remember earlier in the season, we talked
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about this jin, the one that every person is born
with and dies with the front of me for life,
that you just can't shake. According to de Lenz's book,
the way to get the evil gin on the inside,
as it were, was for it to team up with
the victims screen and influence it to make their person
eat the filthy the arm which the evil gin was
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attached to. And once that the arm is inside your
belly and running through your bloodstream, so is the possessing
gin itself. You might be relieved thinking that you're safe
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from gin possession because while no one you know would
or could go to such lengths to saddle you with one,
I mean, no one dislikes you that much, right, But
not all gin possessions are orchestrated by a human enemy.
Sometimes the gin go about possessing people completely of their
own volition. They might do it for revenge if a
human hurt them or another gin, usually without knowing it,
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but they can also be driven by lust, desire, jealousy
of a person, wanting that person to themselves, not unlike
a real life stalker. In such cases, these gin can't
rely on their victim eating the arm to enter the body,
so they have to find other openings, and according to tradition,
every opening in the physical body is fair game for
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the gin, and not just the obvious ones like the nose, mouth,
and ears, even the fused fontanels in the skull like
that soft spot on the top of the head. The temples,
the eye sockets are considered gateways into the inner space
of a human being. Then, of course, there are the
openings of the nether regions, which according to tradition, are
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just as vulnerable to invasion as any other opening in
the body and should be guarded accordingly. But these openings
also don't have to be physical. Overwhelming emotions such as
fear or despair are exactly those cracks that render a
person less able to fend off a gin attack. Fright
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is in a specially powerful break in a person's psychic
defense mechanism, which is one reason evil gin will do
all they can to scare the heavy jeebs out of you.
It's not just for kicks, it's to create breaks in
your armor that lets them right on into your body.
The idea that demons or even Satan could take possession
of a person is as old as the belief in
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these beings themselves, and ancient scrolls were found in the
caves of Gormran on the shores of the West Bank
and Palestine that attest to that belief. You may have
heard of them. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered
in ninety, but date back a few centuries before the
birth of Jesus of Nazareth. A prayer found in the
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scroll reads, do not let Satan or an unclean spirit
rule over me. Do not let pain or an evil
inclination take possession of my bones, demonstrating that the Jews
of this period acknowledge that this was a real possibility. Now,
given that we've all seen the x or sist, you
might believe that we all know the signs of demonic
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possession when we see it. I mean, what else could
explain speaking in tongues while your head spins three sixty degrees.
But the signs aren't always so obvious. An online blog
aptly named gin Exorcist tells the story of an average
housewife who suddenly began acting really strange. The blog has
only two entries, both written by the son of the
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suspected victim of possession. His mother was generally a sweet woman,
sensitive and kind hearted, and when family problems arose, she
took them to heart pretty deeply. One day, having been
unable to sleep the night before because of family issues,
his mother fell with a thud in the kitchen. When
they found her, she was on the floor having passed out,
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maybe from exhaustion, but she seemed okay afterwards and fell
into a deep sleep for the rest of the evening.
But around one am, the family woke suddenly to the
sound of crashing glass. They found the mother standing in
front of her dress or mirror, which she had smashed
with a perfume bottle as she screamed repeatedly, you're a
bad mother. I'm going to kill you. She then turned
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to her husband and demanded to know who he was,
and then she passed out again, and when she came to,
she didn't recognize anyone in the family, not even her children.
At this point, of course, the family started freaking out
and called nine one one, thinking she was having a
psychiatric break, But when she was taken to the hospital,
all the tests checked out just fine. They weren't able
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to find any medical reason for the fainting and memory loss,
and so she was released to go home. The next day,
she seemed fine, but the family had started wondering whether
they were dealing with something supernatural, so the Sun reached
out to a cleric to ask how they would know
if this was Gin related. The cleric told him to
look out for some common but relatively unrecognized symptoms of
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gin possession joint pains, abnormal headaches, extreme temperature changes in
the body, excess of yawning, laziness, and nightmare. He also
advised that they recite a number of prayers and blow
into a glass of water to give the mother to drink.
If she complained that the water tasted weird or like ash,
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that meant a gin had taken over her. They never
did get a chance to do the water test because
it turned out they didn't need it. That same night,
the mother began speaking in someone else's voice, the voice
of the gin that was possessing her. He spoke through
the mother in a deep voice as she either stared
ahead unblinking or closed her eyes with a smirk. His name,
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he said, was a mus Rooney. He was a gin
from India, he told the family, and he liked living
with them and liked living in her body, where he
had dwelled for the past twelve years. We are never
told whether the family was able to exercise Musrooney the
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gin from the mother, because the blog stopped short of
the next entry. But they were on the right path,
because according to the customs, the first thing you need
to try to do when exercising a gin is to
determine the jin's name, if that is the general give it.
The gin will ordinarily resist giving too much information about themselves,
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because the more they give up, the less power they have.
Knowing the name of a gin, where it's from, what
it's lineages, gives you leverage over it, and kind of
a similar way to knowing all that information about someone
you're interrogating. It can take repeated intense questioning, coupled with
irritating the gin, for example by tugging on their victims
ears or pulling their hair. Establishing the name of the
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gin is most important in cultures where exercising a possessed
person is less about driving out in evil gin and
more about establishing what you could call a working relationship
with it. The book The hammad Sha, a study in
Moroccan ethnopsychiatry, details how the latter approach is much more
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likely to be taken on in that region. That's because
in Morocco, certain powerful jin's like La la Aisha, the
camel footed she demon or her consort Sidney Hammu are
not just believed to exist, they're also venerated and feared
If these gin are responsible for a possession, the victim's
best bet is to just join the very Sufi order
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connected to the gin in order to appease it. In
one particular case, a man who was a member of
the Sufi order called the Miliana dreamt on three consecutive
nights that the Jin La la Aisha had grabbed him
by the neck and slammed him onto the ground. She
said to him in the dream, either you work for
me or I'll have your neck. Over the course of
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those days, the man grew so sick and weak he
could no longer walk. Finally, his wife bought him a
black tunic and red turban the colors beloved to La
la Aisha, and after performing a ritual to join the
Jin's order, he recovered. He told the author quote, Aisha
asked me to perform her rituals for the rest of
my life. I will always work for La la Aisha.
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Now women hold a special place among these orders when
it comes to dealing with gin, acting as what are
called the law or exorcism sears. They're brought in especially
when a gin can't be identified, and they use their
powers of divination to cast and read Cali shells. That's right,
those pretty speckled shells that are often made into jewelry
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in our part of the world are in fact central
to one of the oldest divination rituals in the world,
used to connect with ancestors, spirits, and yes jin, most
commonly in West Africa. Once the gin is identified, elaborate
communal rituals are often undertaken to appease the gin, and
one of the most well known such rituals in North
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Africa is the Czar exorcism ceremony. The Czar exorcism is
meant to appease no other than the Tsar itself, malevolent
demons that most frequently attached themselves to women. It's believed
that there are eight demon jins called sar Roach who
all serve at the pleasure of the Jinn, King Warobal Mama,
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and any of these could be behind a possession. The
czar ritual itself is not only done mostly by women,
it's also often led by women. In the two thousand
and three book Women and Demons Culled Healing in Islamic Egypt,
the author witnessed a ritual for herself and Cairo when
she accompanied a well known exorcist named Sika Zahara to
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a ceremony meant to cleanse the gin from a victim
known as the Czar Bride. The ceremony took place in
the dead of the night at the home of a
woman who lived in a house made out of a
grave right in the center of the Cairo Necropolis. The
Necropolis is a massive one thousand year old cemetery called
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the City of the Dead, but it houses not only
the dead, but also thousands of living Egyptians who make
their homes right next to the deceased. A group of
women were already gathered in this grave house, and the author,
also a woman, was immediately doused with incense and seated
on the floor so the ceremony could begin. The Czar Bride,
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a woman in her fifties, was dressed in white with
a head dress and ornaments, and the rest of the
women formed a circle around her. Amid drums enchanting by
shaik A Zara, the women let out a high pitched euilation,
a joyous sound signifying celebration. Suddenly, the drumming and chanting stopped,
and the bride was led into the center of the room,
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where two turkeys were brought to her. Sik A Zara
apologized to the birds and then slaughtered them and smeared
some of the blood on the bride's forehead, cheeks, and hands.
And then something truly unusual happened. A bottle of whiskey
was broken out and poured for everyone in the room. Now,
everyone in that room was Muslim and would ordinarily shun
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alcohol as completely forbidden in the faith, But as was
explained by the author, they were dealing with some very
special circumstances. The gin who had possessed the czar bride
was a Christian gin, and he had ordered that everyone
must drink the whiskey to appease him, and of course
they couldn't say no. The women lit up cigarettes, drank
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the whiskey, and began intense, dramatic, exhausting dancing, shaking and shuddering,
swiveling hips, and swirling scarves and sticks for hours, each
one channeling a different Gin through their particular movements. At
the end of the exorcism, the gin hadn't exactly been
driven anywhere. Rather, the gin had become the master of
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the possessed, and the ceremony itself was a means for
the possessed to submit to the Gin, a submission that
they will be bound to for the rest of their lives.
They will live as their master's servant, dancing the day,
answers the master enjoys, wearing the colors he or she prefers,
and participating in the rituals the master expects. These are exorcism,
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it seems then, it's not at all about exercising the
gin from a person. It's more about exercising a person's
resistance to the gin. It seems like a heavy price
to pay, but for most it's worth it to no
longer be tormented by gin whose power can never be matched.
It's also, i suppose, worth the large sums of money
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that have to be paid to the woman in charge,
sheik Zara for the Czar ritual itself. Of course, not
everyone is on board with pretty much just giving in
and submitting to a gin, and frankly, not all gin's
are on that same train either, which brings us to
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the kind of exorcism that we think about When we
think about exorcism, you know what I mean, the priestly
figure chanting, script, shaking holy water, sweating, hollering, exhausted by
the effort to drive out a demon from its victims.
And yes, those kinds of exorcisms happen all around the
world with experts claiming to be able to expel the
Gin from human hosts. Enter Abu Yusuf, intrepid Jin hunter
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and healer from Detroit, Michigan, who was profiled on the
Religion News blog fifteen years ago. Abu use Of claims
clients all across the globe and was tracked down for
his profile in Beirut on his way to the Gulf
to perform some exorcisms. Yusef wasn't born with any special
powers in the field, but he spent hours studying scripture,
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and one day, two decades later, as he was deep
in study, he suddenly felt something what he wouldn't say.
It was a secret, and that secret opened up the
secret world of Gin to him, a world he was
able to see clearly. Ever, since not every Gin exorcist
has the power to see Jin. Ordinarily, making use of
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special in a I see dead people kind of way,
he could vouch, for example, that six of the dwellings
in the UK were haunted by Gin, and could also
tell what a person is possessed by a Jin even
if that person is showing no apparent signs of it
during the interview itself. Use have told one of the
two journalists that she was possessed by a gin, but
her male colleague nope, which tracks with the use of
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theory that most gin possessions happened to women by jin who,
out of lustful obsession, sexually violate their victim. Those such cases,
he said he saw frequently. The reporter, who was hoping
to witness an exorcism, decided she may as well just
get exercised herself, and so she revisited Yusuf, who began
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by seating her in a chair, feet firmly planted, hands
on her thighs relaxed as use have bent close to
her ear chanting prayers. At first, she tried to focus
on the words, but then they all started to blur together.
Then she rights the shadows and lights reflected on the
stone floor start to dance. My vision blurs, My hands
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start to sweat. I can feel my hands start to
lift up just a little bit, but strongly enough to
make it hard to keep them down when I try.
I have no idea how long this is all taken.
It has been some twenty minutes until my hands and
legs started shaking slowly. My hands are still up, and
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that was it. She was then given a drink of
water and told that the gin would never bother her again,
that it had left her body through her hands and feet.
The journalist was rather shocked that the entire thing was
so painless. That, explained Yusef, was because he knew what
he was doing, which is why he said there were
people around the world willing to pay him thousands of
dollars to help free them of the demons that conventional
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medicine failed at Now, if that seems like a stretch,
it isn't at all. A two thousand and nineteen piece
on the Metador Network travel blog, written by Middle East
culture writer Baxter Jackson, tells the story of a woman
who traveled all the way from the US to the
country of Oman in order to take care of her
gin problem. Jackson had years earlier written about a famous
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gin exorcist named mall Lam Salim, who was from and
lived in Bahla, an oasis town in Oman. But Bahla
isn't just any old town, though it's made it into
the National Geographics list of the top ten most haunted
places in the world, and was also featured in an
NPR segment for the unusual and unexplainable supernatural things that
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took place there. It's called for good reason, Medina the Alser,
the city of magic, black magic. That is, the stories
out of Bahla are endless pillars of fire that erupt
out of the desert sands spontaneously, crumbling walls that refused
to be rebuilt, Mosques that fly, which is that take
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off with little girls, and accounts of peop will who
look out of a window only to see their own
self looking back in and encountering gin that have taken
on the appearance of a dead loved one. It's not
a surprise to find men like maure Lum Salim in
a place run amok with gin. And so when a
young woman from Boston read Baxter Jackson's piece, she reached
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out to him, saying, I'm an American, I live in Boston,
and I have a gin problem, and I'm not crazy.
She wanted to see if more Lump Salim could help her,
and she was willing to fly halfway across the world
to see him, and so Jackson found himself picking her
up at the airport and escorting her along with another friend,
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to the exorcist's home in Bahala, driving through a dust
storm and then right into a fearsome thunderstorm as they
reached the town, more Lump Salim was a large, imposing figure,
but welcoming. They settled in with cups of cardamum coffee
in the middle of a room scattered with amulets. The
exerci carefully opened a massive book filled with rice paper pages,
(31:04):
each one covered in Arabic scribbles, symbols, and diagrams. Now
the room was brightly lit with neon tube lights, but
suddenly a shadow, dark and defined, raced across the walls
of the room, and incomprehensible whispers filled the air. Everyone gasped.
No one had moved, there was nothing that could have
(31:25):
created that shadow that clearly flew across the room, and
certainly the whispers had erupted out of nowhere. Suddenly, more
Lem Salim declared Al Malak as the black Prince of
the Gin, that was the gin that the young woman
was afflicted with. The exorcist lit some frankincense, had the
woman lay in the center of the floor and began
(31:47):
reciting scripture and chanting prayers over her, his hand resting
on her forehead. The woman exhaled a deep sigh and
a rush of cold air filled the room, and as
more Lem Salim continued to pray, she suddenly sat upright
and screamed ferociously as the thunder outside roared. She had
to be wrestled back unto laying down again by the
(32:09):
two men witnessing the exorcism, and Muam Salim shook a
vial of holy water over her body. She groaned, twisting
and turning trying to get free from the men, and
her fingers and toes curled tightly. Another shadow flew across
the wall as Muallem Salim thundered, he who returns over
and over again, he who whispers evil into the hearts
(32:30):
of men, whether he be from among the Gin or
men be gone. The storm outside seemed to parallel the
climax of the exorcism. Suddenly dying down and Baxter Jackson
watched as the young woman's body relaxed and her eyes,
which had been rolled back in their sockets, returned to normal.
They helped her up a bit weak, said their goodbyes
(32:52):
to the exorcist, and returned to their car. There, the
woman said she felt better, lighter, like a weight had
been lifted from her, but that didn't mean she thought
she was cured, because before coming to Amman to meet
maua lump Slim, she had gone to the Uae and
had an exorcism there with another shake. But according to her,
after the ritual, the Jin had returned with a vengeance,
(33:14):
and unfortunately her story didn't end there. The respite she
got from the Black Prince of the Jin was only temporary,
and eventually she decided to travel to Indonesia to give
yet one more exorcist a try. While the young woman
(33:36):
in this story unfortunately wasn't able to rid herself of
the Jin that haunted her, she's lucky that the exorcist
she saw didn't resort to more extreme measures, because in
the world of gin, exorcism is perfectly acceptable to beat
a gin out of you. According to the thirteenth century
theologian Ibnthemia, it's permissible to strike a possessed person as
(33:57):
many strikes as it took to get rid of the gin,
because it was the gin who felt the pain of
the strikes, not the human, who, even Theamia said wouldn't
feel a thing, and the screams coming from the person
being beaten, well, no need to be concerned about those either,
because that was the jin screaming, not the human, which
means something must have gone very wrong. In the case
(34:20):
of Abdul Khalam, a forty eight year old Bangladeshi man
who died in February after an exorcism, abduk Alam had
been acting kind of strange lately, so the family thought
he might be suffering from a gin possession. They took
him to a local exorcist, who, along with his assistance,
held abdu ke Alam underwater until he nearly drowned, and
(34:42):
then beat him badly to drive the gin out. The
next day, Galam was found dead, having succumbed to his injuries.
The exorcist may have driven the gin out, but also
took Glam's life in the process. Charges were filed against
the exorcist, but he's not loan and having used possession
as an excuse to physically abuse a person. In fact,
(35:04):
a social worker in one British community told a reporter
that she had seen numerous times women who, when seeking
help to get out of abusive situations, be silenced by
others as being possessed, and she had also seen cases
in which family members or a spouse claiming a woman
was possessed by a gin beat her mercilessly. In other words,
(35:27):
gin possession was used both as an excuse to dismiss
allegations of abuse, but also as an excuse to actually
abuse these victims. Unfortunately, the world of gin possession and
exorcism is ripe for abuse, and a field like this
is also an open invitation to some who take advantage
of the desperate, especially because it can pay pretty well.
(35:50):
Like most things in life, jin exorcism is commodified. In
two thousand and twelve, the BBC reported a profile of
an East London exorcist named Abu Mohammed, with a video
showing him performing an actual exorcism. His waiting list is
many months long, and he charged back then around a
hundred dollars for a one hour session. Not too steep,
(36:13):
but not a bad source of income if you're booked
back to back for months. It's fair to say, though,
that his prices are on the low end of the
spectrum when you consider that Mohammad Yowafi, a famed Jordanian exorcist,
charges an average of three thousand dollars for an exorcism. Once, however,
he charged an Arab millionaire thirty thousand dollars to cleanse
(36:35):
his palatial residence of a Jin king and the king's
entire Jin army, which had apparently taken up residence there.
The millionaire was so happy with the results that he
gifted Yowaffe an expensive watch as an extra bonus. You'll
find Jin removers and exorcists all over the internet selling
their services, though traditionally the good ones don't need to advertise.
(36:59):
They're known by word of mouth, and if anything, they
prefer to work as privately as possible. And while some
may take advantage of people seeking answers, there are plenty
of them who are actually pretty committed and sincere in
wanting to help. They really believe that there are dark
forces that attack people, and they believe they can make
a difference, and sometimes they're able to serve an even
(37:21):
greater purpose in bringing people together in unexpected ways. Coptic
Christians and Muslims have lived side by side for centuries
in Egypt, and while at times political circumstances have led
to not just tension between the communities, but even unfortunately
actual violence. There is one certain space that has managed
to evade such crises, and that is the Church of
(37:44):
Father Samaan Ibraheim, one of the very few priests in
all of Egypt who is allowed to perform exorcisms, and
every week he performs mass exorcisms that draw people from
every walk of life and every faith to him. The
story of how Father Ibrahim came to this work is
a legend unto itself. Decades ago, he saw a vision
(38:07):
that inspired him to build a church for the people
who lived by the Kutham Mountain, a place itself connected
with miracles. That congregation in the nineteen seventies and today
consists of the poorest Christian community in the city, called
the Zabalein, which literally means garbage people. The Zabalein, nearly
(38:27):
all Christian, have for nearly a hundred years now, been
the city's primary garbage collectors and sorters, entire families making
their living by hauling away, sorting, and recycling mountains of trash,
and their largest community, around thirty thousand of them, live
in what is nicknamed Garbage City at the foot of
(38:47):
the Mautham Mountain, where Father Ibraheim established his church. It's
no ordinary church, though. The discovery nine of an incredible
cave under the mountain, a cave with pillars already made
to rock, was an answer to the priest's prayers. He
had been looking for an expansive area for worshippers to gather,
but finding no such space in the city crowded with
(39:10):
people in garbage. This cave was assigned from God to
gather under the earth itself, and so in that cave
was built what is now known as the Cave Cathedral,
and every Thursday night, live streaming online, thousands gather in
the Cave Cathedral, many of whom are Muslim, to get
Father Ibrahim's help in exercising their demons. Numerous news stories
(39:34):
have been written about these exorcisms, and in two thousand
and fourteen, a vice journalists decided to go witness one
for himself. He sat through a two hour rather ordinary
church service, after which spurts of howling rose from different
parts of the cathedral. Men and women apparently afflicted with
gin began clawing at the priest, begging for his attention
(39:55):
and for a few drops of the holy water that
he was throwing around. Muslim women with their heads covered
in hijab, lined up with bottles of water for the
priest to bless them with his own saliva. Others grunted
and groaned in the pews, thrashing around until the priest
laid his hands on them. The entire affair lasted about
twenty minutes, and the journalists who witnessed it didn't seem
(40:18):
all much impressed. But he asked one woman how she
felt after it seemed her demon had been banished. She
told him I feel great, thanks to God. The conclusion
reached by the journalist was this that we just view
the problems in our heads differently. Some see them as
mental or emotional health issues, and others as external forces
(40:39):
of good or evil. And so a gin exorcism, whether
or not an actual jin is a problem, or whether
or not the exorcism itself is real, is just one
way to bring some comfort to those who seek spiritual catharsis.
And as for the phenomena of possession itself, well, some
theorize it's a form of resistance to helplessness, cultural and
(41:03):
social restrictions, and bad personal situations. It can be a
pathway of empowerment to women who find spaces to dance
and smoke and drink and wield spiritual power during exorcism
rituals when they aren't able to do so anywhere else.
Or it could be an expression of powerless men unable
to overcome social expectations. Maybe for some, possession is an
(41:24):
instrument of expressing despair and anguish, of heartache and pain.
Remember the mother who was possessed for twelve years by
the Indian gin named mus Rooney. When the gin was
questioned about why, having lived inside of her for twelve years,
did he finally decide to manifest now, the gin told
the family it wasn't to torment the mother. Far from it.
(41:46):
He emerged as a lesson to them because they didn't
treat their mother right. A pretty convenient possession for the mom,
you could say. But if you're like me, it's still
hard to dismiss gin possession outright. And that's because you
can't really pick and choose how far you want to
go in your supernatural beliefs. Like I've said before, it's
(42:06):
kind of like being a little pregnant. Once you're in,
you're in. Once you believe there's something out there, something
we can't understand or ever fully know. Where do you
draw the line. If you believe ghosts, for example, are possible,
then why aren't fairies and UFOs and angels and demons
and God and Satan and yes Jin possible? And if
they're possible, how do you know what they can and
(42:28):
can't do, what they will and won't do? You don't,
and neither do I, because no matter how hard we try,
and believe me, people have been trying for thousands of years,
will never fully know the world of the Hidden Gin.
(42:53):
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,
(43:17):
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
(43:41):
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 g mail dot com and you might
(44:01):
just 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.
(44:24):
The Hidden 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
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Our theme song was created by Patrick Cortez.
(44:49):
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 Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkey. Listener discretion
is advised. I have five maternal uncles, each one of
(00:32):
them a little bit crazier than the last. One of
these uncles, one of my favorites of the entire group.
In fact, had been engaged to be married half a
dozen times. He had been trying to get married for
nearly fifteen years, but every single time the engagement would
get broken off for some reason or another. Year after
year went by and he could never go from being
(00:53):
engaged to actually getting married. He was in his late thirties,
a point by which he should have been well settled
down with a few kids of his own. And he
was a really nice guy, decent looking, He had his
own plays, had a great job, travel the world. No
one could figure out why he just couldn't seal the deal,
until finally, when he was advised to go see a
(01:15):
local woman known for her supernatural abilities. Maybe he was
told she could figure out what was wrong, and so
he went to her. He dragged a friend along with
him to her tiny, crumbling home on the outskirts of
the city. A little bit nervous about whether what he
was doing was even kosher. He had heard that this
medium healer whatever she was, dealt in black magic, and
(01:39):
that made her dangerous. But he said his prayers and
sucked up his fear because at this point he was desperate.
She was younger than he had imagined, rail thin, sunken eyes,
swaddled up in numerous shawls despite the blazing heat, and
she sat in a small, dusty courtyard on a low
woven seat and motion for my uncle to sit on
(02:00):
a sheet spread out on the floor in front of her.
She asked him his name, his parents names, and his
date of birth. Then she closed her eyes and mumbled
some prayers. After a very long five minutes or so,
her eyes flew open, and she told my uncle, I
know what's wrong. Someone has done black magic on you.
They've conjured a jin to block your marriage. So every
(02:24):
time you get close to getting married, this gin interferes
and whispers dark things into your heart or your fiance's heart,
and turns you against each other. The person who did
this magic on you as a woman who wants to
ruin your life, and her name starts with an end.
Now many of the women closest to him, including cousins
(02:44):
and sister in laws, and even his own mother had
names that started with the letter N. But he had
a feeling he knew exactly who it was, a sister
in law that he didn't trust, and he wasn't about
to let her get away with it. The healer told
him exactly what he needed to do to break the
curse and handed him a list of items he'd have
to retrieve and return to her with along with her fee,
(03:06):
the equivalent of about two U s. Dollars. She also
handed him a small plastic container, which she told him
was a vial of holy water from the spring of
Zum Zum in Mecca. He was to take this vial
and place it under his bed and return with it
and the other things she needed after a week. Seven
days later, he returned to her with all she had
(03:28):
asked for, hair stolen from the brush of the person
he suspected to have done the black magic, a black
rubber slipper, a basket of dried red chilies, and a
bundle of cash he washed as she placed the hair
on the dirt floor of the courtyard and poured the
holy water over it. Then she took the black rubber
sandal and began slapping the now wet patch on the floor,
(03:51):
screaming the sister in law's name, and to hell with you,
to hell with you, over and over. My uncle had
never seen anything like it. He was mortified. As she
grew more frenzied, bouncing up and down, slapping the muddy
strands of hair with all her might, until suddenly she
collapsed in silence. After a few minutes, she collected herself
(04:11):
and emptied the bag of dried chilies on top of
the rubber sandal, which was still laying in the watery
mess she had made. Then she set the little pile
of dried chilies on fire. Now, if you have never
burned dried chilies, the smoke is thick and peppery and choking.
And as this smoke rose, she blew it towards my uncle,
who sat their eyes watering, holding back coughs. He tried
(04:35):
to get up, but she signaled him to sit back down,
where he suffered until the fire went out and there
was no more smoke left. The healer then gathered up
some of the ashes into a cotton pouch and handed
him to my uncle, telling him to bury them where
no one would find them, and that once they were buried,
the curse would be broken. Now, my uncle told me
this story about a year after all of this had
(04:57):
taken place, and he laughed as he told did, and
I laughed with him, tears streaming down our faces as
he re enacted how that woman had slapped the black
slipper on the ground over and over, howling for his
sister in law to go to hell. The entire thing
had been ridiculous, he admitted, but he had gone ahead
and buried the ashes even though he was pretty sure
(05:18):
that the healer was a fraud. But I wasn't so sure, though,
because at the time he told me this, seventeen years ago,
I was visiting Pakistan and we were sitting in our
family home preparing for his wedding. I'm Robbiadrey, and I'll
be your guide into the world of the hidden Gin. Welcome.
(05:50):
While most gin, you could argue, are busy in their
own lives, going about their gin business, we do know
that business isn't always confined to their own realm. There
are places here on earth with a gin are known
to live and linger ruins and graveyards. But then sometimes
the GIN will decide to take up residence in your residence.
Hollywood has produced dozens of films unhaunted houses, and ghost
(06:12):
hunters on TV have long entertained us with shaky visuals
of darkened locations, so we are all familiar with what
a potential haunting looks like. The most benign of them
are just the entity making its presence known, like moving
things around, playing little tricks on the residence, or staking
acclaim in a corner of the house as their own.
Believe it or not, I've had such experiences, and while
(06:34):
I do admit being freaked out, it was mostly just
a nuisance. But there are much more extreme circumstances, of course,
where the Gin are committed to driving out people from
their homes, and they do so by terrifying them in
all sorts of ways. Over the years, I've heard dozens
and dozens of stories about household objects being smashed, doors
(06:54):
being slammed at all hours of the night, chairs with
people seated in them, being dragged across the room, toilets
and tubs overflowing on their own, and so on and
so forth. And you can witness similar things yourself online.
That is, there are endless YouTube videos of purported house
hauntings and human gin possessions. Entire accounts dedicated to just
(07:16):
these sorts of things, though I am rather skeptical of
the gin hunters who seem to find them in every
dark house they go into. Forget finding jin, though, it's
getting rid of them. That's a much tougher task, whether
you're exercising them from a place or from a human body.
It's not for the faint of heart, and certainly not
for the lay person, because when the possession is serious,
(07:39):
most of us are hardly equipped to get into a
fist fight with a gin. Enter the world of gin exorcism,
a realm full of quacks and frauds, but also powerful
spiritual healers that risk their lives to drive out dark
gin from human bodies and abodes. But before they can
exercise a gin, a gin has to first take possession.
(08:09):
It's believed that there are certain parts of a house
or dwelling that you're most likely to find the gin in,
usually the darkest, dirtiest, or most abandoned parts of a residence,
which is understandable, like the bathroom or a dank basement,
maybe a dusty attic, but the gin are also drawn
to in between places. That's why they're most active in
(08:31):
this sliver of time between day and night, between dusk
and dawn, and it's also why they lurk under thresholds,
neither inside or out, but just on the boundary, but
also right at the opening openings to a home or
to a room. And similarly, the gin also need openings
into human beings, a crack or vulnerability that will let
(08:54):
them in, and they have a number of tricks up
their sleeves to get on the inside, as it were.
According to Moroccan lore, a jin can be invited to
possess someone if the victim can be tricked into eating
something called the ahm. In the early part of the
twentieth century, the French artist Aleen R. De Lenz, one
of the first women ever to be admitted to the
(09:15):
Art School of Paris, moved to Morocco with her husband,
which was at the time colonized by France. Once settled
in her new country, Aleen dedicated herself to the revival
of what she deemed native arts, and herself went on
to create over a hundred paintings and write dozens of
short stories and numerous volumes about the lives of the
(09:36):
people that she lived among. She was particularly fascinated with
the lives of Moroccan women and their cultural norms and practices,
which are central to many of her writings. De Lenz
died young at the age of forty four in nineteen
twenty five, and shortly after her death, her final book
was published, Practices of Moroccan Harems, Witchcraft, Medicine, Beauty. The
(10:00):
book was a collection of magical rituals and recipes used
by Moroccan women and healers for almost every issue you
could imagine, including recipes to and I quote, give a
deflowered bride the appearance of virginity, ashore a husband's fidelity,
bring misfortune upon a co wife, augment the size of breasts,
(10:20):
and for irritated mothers in law, detaching a newly married
son from the two beloved new wife. If a wife
wanted to dominate a marriage, according to this book, all
she had to do was, after being intimate with her husband,
urinate into her cupped hand and then pour the contents
into her unsuspecting husband's tea while reciting this chant, I
(10:43):
made you drink my water so that you do not
see but by my eyes you do not hear, but
by my ears you do not speak, but by my words.
If a woman wanted her husband to desire her more,
she had to preserve a fresh, plump date inside her
well private regions and then mix it into her husband's food.
(11:04):
To stop an abusive husband from beating his wife, he
had to be fed soup made with hyena's brains, and
so on and so forth. Among these recipes was the
preparation of the arm, the food that, if eaten, would
cause a person to be controlled in a variety of ways.
The magicians and healers who prepared that the arm claimed
(11:24):
that it was in fact prepared at the guidance and
direction of the Jinn themselves. The preparation was described in
de Lenz's book like this, The coast coast is rolled
by the hand of the dead, mixed with the crushed
bones of the dead as a fatida, fallen hair reduced
to cinders, powder of dry toronto would have figged finally pulverized.
(11:48):
This is at the base of all magic drugs administered.
Unknown to the victim. That hand of the dead thing,
by the way, wasn't taken lightly. Local doctors once reported
to de Lend that two women were caught digging up
a grave so that they could steal the hands from
a cadaver and use them to prepare food for one
of their husbands. They weren't trying to get him possessed,
(12:10):
though the ritual was supposed to have the effect of
a love potion and filled the spouse with endless desire
for his wife. Instead, once the women were caught, the
husband actually divorced the wife. Now, if you want to
cause an actual gin possession, more foul things have to
be added to the base of this concoction. To take
(12:30):
things further, dung and feces, choice foods of the gin
are added to that the um, resulting in a filthy
mix that no person in their right mind would voluntarily eat,
which is why the victim has to be tricked into
eating it, And that trick involves the person's own personal jin,
the kareen. You'll remember earlier in the season, we talked
(12:52):
about this jin, the one that every person is born
with and dies with the front of me for life,
that you just can't shake. According to de Lenz's book,
the way to get the evil gin on the inside,
as it were, was for it to team up with
the victims screen and influence it to make their person
eat the filthy the arm which the evil gin was
(13:13):
attached to. And once that the arm is inside your
belly and running through your bloodstream, so is the possessing
gin itself. You might be relieved thinking that you're safe
(13:35):
from gin possession because while no one you know would
or could go to such lengths to saddle you with one,
I mean, no one dislikes you that much, right, But
not all gin possessions are orchestrated by a human enemy.
Sometimes the gin go about possessing people completely of their
own volition. They might do it for revenge if a
human hurt them or another gin, usually without knowing it,
(13:58):
but they can also be driven by lust, desire, jealousy
of a person, wanting that person to themselves, not unlike
a real life stalker. In such cases, these gin can't
rely on their victim eating the arm to enter the body,
so they have to find other openings, and according to tradition,
every opening in the physical body is fair game for
(14:19):
the gin, and not just the obvious ones like the nose, mouth,
and ears, even the fused fontanels in the skull like
that soft spot on the top of the head. The temples,
the eye sockets are considered gateways into the inner space
of a human being. Then, of course, there are the
openings of the nether regions, which according to tradition, are
(14:39):
just as vulnerable to invasion as any other opening in
the body and should be guarded accordingly. But these openings
also don't have to be physical. Overwhelming emotions such as
fear or despair are exactly those cracks that render a
person less able to fend off a gin attack. Fright
(14:59):
is in a specially powerful break in a person's psychic
defense mechanism, which is one reason evil gin will do
all they can to scare the heavy jeebs out of you.
It's not just for kicks, it's to create breaks in
your armor that lets them right on into your body.
The idea that demons or even Satan could take possession
of a person is as old as the belief in
(15:21):
these beings themselves, and ancient scrolls were found in the
caves of Gormran on the shores of the West Bank
and Palestine that attest to that belief. You may have
heard of them. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered
in ninety, but date back a few centuries before the
birth of Jesus of Nazareth. A prayer found in the
(15:42):
scroll reads, do not let Satan or an unclean spirit
rule over me. Do not let pain or an evil
inclination take possession of my bones, demonstrating that the Jews
of this period acknowledge that this was a real possibility. Now,
given that we've all seen the x or sist, you
might believe that we all know the signs of demonic
(16:02):
possession when we see it. I mean, what else could
explain speaking in tongues while your head spins three sixty degrees.
But the signs aren't always so obvious. An online blog
aptly named gin Exorcist tells the story of an average
housewife who suddenly began acting really strange. The blog has
only two entries, both written by the son of the
(16:24):
suspected victim of possession. His mother was generally a sweet woman,
sensitive and kind hearted, and when family problems arose, she
took them to heart pretty deeply. One day, having been
unable to sleep the night before because of family issues,
his mother fell with a thud in the kitchen. When
they found her, she was on the floor having passed out,
(16:45):
maybe from exhaustion, but she seemed okay afterwards and fell
into a deep sleep for the rest of the evening.
But around one am, the family woke suddenly to the
sound of crashing glass. They found the mother standing in
front of her dress or mirror, which she had smashed
with a perfume bottle as she screamed repeatedly, you're a
bad mother. I'm going to kill you. She then turned
(17:08):
to her husband and demanded to know who he was,
and then she passed out again, and when she came to,
she didn't recognize anyone in the family, not even her children.
At this point, of course, the family started freaking out
and called nine one one, thinking she was having a
psychiatric break, But when she was taken to the hospital,
all the tests checked out just fine. They weren't able
(17:29):
to find any medical reason for the fainting and memory loss,
and so she was released to go home. The next day,
she seemed fine, but the family had started wondering whether
they were dealing with something supernatural, so the Sun reached
out to a cleric to ask how they would know
if this was Gin related. The cleric told him to
look out for some common but relatively unrecognized symptoms of
(17:51):
gin possession joint pains, abnormal headaches, extreme temperature changes in
the body, excess of yawning, laziness, and nightmare. He also
advised that they recite a number of prayers and blow
into a glass of water to give the mother to drink.
If she complained that the water tasted weird or like ash,
(18:11):
that meant a gin had taken over her. They never
did get a chance to do the water test because
it turned out they didn't need it. That same night,
the mother began speaking in someone else's voice, the voice
of the gin that was possessing her. He spoke through
the mother in a deep voice as she either stared
ahead unblinking or closed her eyes with a smirk. His name,
(18:34):
he said, was a mus Rooney. He was a gin
from India, he told the family, and he liked living
with them and liked living in her body, where he
had dwelled for the past twelve years. We are never
told whether the family was able to exercise Musrooney the
(18:55):
gin from the mother, because the blog stopped short of
the next entry. But they were on the right path,
because according to the customs, the first thing you need
to try to do when exercising a gin is to
determine the jin's name, if that is the general give it.
The gin will ordinarily resist giving too much information about themselves,
(19:16):
because the more they give up, the less power they have.
Knowing the name of a gin, where it's from, what
it's lineages, gives you leverage over it, and kind of
a similar way to knowing all that information about someone
you're interrogating. It can take repeated intense questioning, coupled with
irritating the gin, for example by tugging on their victims
ears or pulling their hair. Establishing the name of the
(19:39):
gin is most important in cultures where exercising a possessed
person is less about driving out in evil gin and
more about establishing what you could call a working relationship
with it. The book The hammad Sha, a study in
Moroccan ethnopsychiatry, details how the latter approach is much more
(20:00):
likely to be taken on in that region. That's because
in Morocco, certain powerful jin's like La la Aisha, the
camel footed she demon or her consort Sidney Hammu are
not just believed to exist, they're also venerated and feared
If these gin are responsible for a possession, the victim's
best bet is to just join the very Sufi order
(20:21):
connected to the gin in order to appease it. In
one particular case, a man who was a member of
the Sufi order called the Miliana dreamt on three consecutive
nights that the Jin La la Aisha had grabbed him
by the neck and slammed him onto the ground. She
said to him in the dream, either you work for
me or I'll have your neck. Over the course of
(20:43):
those days, the man grew so sick and weak he
could no longer walk. Finally, his wife bought him a
black tunic and red turban the colors beloved to La
la Aisha, and after performing a ritual to join the
Jin's order, he recovered. He told the author quote, Aisha
asked me to perform her rituals for the rest of
my life. I will always work for La la Aisha.
(21:11):
Now women hold a special place among these orders when
it comes to dealing with gin, acting as what are
called the law or exorcism sears. They're brought in especially
when a gin can't be identified, and they use their
powers of divination to cast and read Cali shells. That's right,
those pretty speckled shells that are often made into jewelry
(21:31):
in our part of the world are in fact central
to one of the oldest divination rituals in the world,
used to connect with ancestors, spirits, and yes jin, most
commonly in West Africa. Once the gin is identified, elaborate
communal rituals are often undertaken to appease the gin, and
one of the most well known such rituals in North
(21:53):
Africa is the Czar exorcism ceremony. The Czar exorcism is
meant to appease no other than the Tsar itself, malevolent
demons that most frequently attached themselves to women. It's believed
that there are eight demon jins called sar Roach who
all serve at the pleasure of the Jinn, King Warobal Mama,
(22:16):
and any of these could be behind a possession. The
czar ritual itself is not only done mostly by women,
it's also often led by women. In the two thousand
and three book Women and Demons Culled Healing in Islamic Egypt,
the author witnessed a ritual for herself and Cairo when
she accompanied a well known exorcist named Sika Zahara to
(22:38):
a ceremony meant to cleanse the gin from a victim
known as the Czar Bride. The ceremony took place in
the dead of the night at the home of a
woman who lived in a house made out of a
grave right in the center of the Cairo Necropolis. The
Necropolis is a massive one thousand year old cemetery called
(22:58):
the City of the Dead, but it houses not only
the dead, but also thousands of living Egyptians who make
their homes right next to the deceased. A group of
women were already gathered in this grave house, and the author,
also a woman, was immediately doused with incense and seated
on the floor so the ceremony could begin. The Czar Bride,
(23:19):
a woman in her fifties, was dressed in white with
a head dress and ornaments, and the rest of the
women formed a circle around her. Amid drums enchanting by
shaik A Zara, the women let out a high pitched euilation,
a joyous sound signifying celebration. Suddenly, the drumming and chanting stopped,
and the bride was led into the center of the room,
(23:41):
where two turkeys were brought to her. Sik A Zara
apologized to the birds and then slaughtered them and smeared
some of the blood on the bride's forehead, cheeks, and hands.
And then something truly unusual happened. A bottle of whiskey
was broken out and poured for everyone in the room. Now,
everyone in that room was Muslim and would ordinarily shun
(24:04):
alcohol as completely forbidden in the faith, But as was
explained by the author, they were dealing with some very
special circumstances. The gin who had possessed the czar bride
was a Christian gin, and he had ordered that everyone
must drink the whiskey to appease him, and of course
they couldn't say no. The women lit up cigarettes, drank
(24:25):
the whiskey, and began intense, dramatic, exhausting dancing, shaking and shuddering,
swiveling hips, and swirling scarves and sticks for hours, each
one channeling a different Gin through their particular movements. At
the end of the exorcism, the gin hadn't exactly been
driven anywhere. Rather, the gin had become the master of
(24:47):
the possessed, and the ceremony itself was a means for
the possessed to submit to the Gin, a submission that
they will be bound to for the rest of their lives.
They will live as their master's servant, dancing the day,
answers the master enjoys, wearing the colors he or she prefers,
and participating in the rituals the master expects. These are exorcism,
(25:09):
it seems then, it's not at all about exercising the
gin from a person. It's more about exercising a person's
resistance to the gin. It seems like a heavy price
to pay, but for most it's worth it to no
longer be tormented by gin whose power can never be matched.
It's also, i suppose, worth the large sums of money
(25:30):
that have to be paid to the woman in charge,
sheik Zara for the Czar ritual itself. Of course, not
everyone is on board with pretty much just giving in
and submitting to a gin, and frankly, not all gin's
are on that same train either, which brings us to
(25:52):
the kind of exorcism that we think about When we
think about exorcism, you know what I mean, the priestly
figure chanting, script, shaking holy water, sweating, hollering, exhausted by
the effort to drive out a demon from its victims.
And yes, those kinds of exorcisms happen all around the
world with experts claiming to be able to expel the
Gin from human hosts. Enter Abu Yusuf, intrepid Jin hunter
(26:17):
and healer from Detroit, Michigan, who was profiled on the
Religion News blog fifteen years ago. Abu use Of claims
clients all across the globe and was tracked down for
his profile in Beirut on his way to the Gulf
to perform some exorcisms. Yusef wasn't born with any special
powers in the field, but he spent hours studying scripture,
(26:37):
and one day, two decades later, as he was deep
in study, he suddenly felt something what he wouldn't say.
It was a secret, and that secret opened up the
secret world of Gin to him, a world he was
able to see clearly. Ever, since not every Gin exorcist
has the power to see Jin. Ordinarily, making use of
(26:59):
special in a I see dead people kind of way,
he could vouch, for example, that six of the dwellings
in the UK were haunted by Gin, and could also
tell what a person is possessed by a Jin even
if that person is showing no apparent signs of it
during the interview itself. Use have told one of the
two journalists that she was possessed by a gin, but
her male colleague nope, which tracks with the use of
(27:23):
theory that most gin possessions happened to women by jin who,
out of lustful obsession, sexually violate their victim. Those such cases,
he said he saw frequently. The reporter, who was hoping
to witness an exorcism, decided she may as well just
get exercised herself, and so she revisited Yusuf, who began
(27:43):
by seating her in a chair, feet firmly planted, hands
on her thighs relaxed as use have bent close to
her ear chanting prayers. At first, she tried to focus
on the words, but then they all started to blur together.
Then she rights the shadows and lights reflected on the
stone floor start to dance. My vision blurs, My hands
(28:07):
start to sweat. I can feel my hands start to
lift up just a little bit, but strongly enough to
make it hard to keep them down when I try.
I have no idea how long this is all taken.
It has been some twenty minutes until my hands and
legs started shaking slowly. My hands are still up, and
(28:27):
that was it. She was then given a drink of
water and told that the gin would never bother her again,
that it had left her body through her hands and feet.
The journalist was rather shocked that the entire thing was
so painless. That, explained Yusef, was because he knew what
he was doing, which is why he said there were
people around the world willing to pay him thousands of
dollars to help free them of the demons that conventional
(28:51):
medicine failed at Now, if that seems like a stretch,
it isn't at all. A two thousand and nineteen piece
on the Metador Network travel blog, written by Middle East
culture writer Baxter Jackson, tells the story of a woman
who traveled all the way from the US to the
country of Oman in order to take care of her
gin problem. Jackson had years earlier written about a famous
(29:15):
gin exorcist named mall Lam Salim, who was from and
lived in Bahla, an oasis town in Oman. But Bahla
isn't just any old town, though it's made it into
the National Geographics list of the top ten most haunted
places in the world, and was also featured in an
NPR segment for the unusual and unexplainable supernatural things that
(29:37):
took place there. It's called for good reason, Medina the Alser,
the city of magic, black magic. That is, the stories
out of Bahla are endless pillars of fire that erupt
out of the desert sands spontaneously, crumbling walls that refused
to be rebuilt, Mosques that fly, which is that take
(29:57):
off with little girls, and accounts of peop will who
look out of a window only to see their own
self looking back in and encountering gin that have taken
on the appearance of a dead loved one. It's not
a surprise to find men like maure Lum Salim in
a place run amok with gin. And so when a
young woman from Boston read Baxter Jackson's piece, she reached
(30:20):
out to him, saying, I'm an American, I live in Boston,
and I have a gin problem, and I'm not crazy.
She wanted to see if more Lump Salim could help her,
and she was willing to fly halfway across the world
to see him, and so Jackson found himself picking her
up at the airport and escorting her along with another friend,
(30:41):
to the exorcist's home in Bahala, driving through a dust
storm and then right into a fearsome thunderstorm as they
reached the town, more Lump Salim was a large, imposing figure,
but welcoming. They settled in with cups of cardamum coffee
in the middle of a room scattered with amulets. The
exerci carefully opened a massive book filled with rice paper pages,
(31:04):
each one covered in Arabic scribbles, symbols, and diagrams. Now
the room was brightly lit with neon tube lights, but
suddenly a shadow, dark and defined, raced across the walls
of the room, and incomprehensible whispers filled the air. Everyone gasped.
No one had moved, there was nothing that could have
(31:25):
created that shadow that clearly flew across the room, and
certainly the whispers had erupted out of nowhere. Suddenly, more
Lem Salim declared Al Malak as the black Prince of
the Gin, that was the gin that the young woman
was afflicted with. The exorcist lit some frankincense, had the
woman lay in the center of the floor and began
(31:47):
reciting scripture and chanting prayers over her, his hand resting
on her forehead. The woman exhaled a deep sigh and
a rush of cold air filled the room, and as
more Lem Salim continued to pray, she suddenly sat upright
and screamed ferociously as the thunder outside roared. She had
to be wrestled back unto laying down again by the
(32:09):
two men witnessing the exorcism, and Muam Salim shook a
vial of holy water over her body. She groaned, twisting
and turning trying to get free from the men, and
her fingers and toes curled tightly. Another shadow flew across
the wall as Muallem Salim thundered, he who returns over
and over again, he who whispers evil into the hearts
(32:30):
of men, whether he be from among the Gin or
men be gone. The storm outside seemed to parallel the
climax of the exorcism. Suddenly dying down and Baxter Jackson
watched as the young woman's body relaxed and her eyes,
which had been rolled back in their sockets, returned to normal.
They helped her up a bit weak, said their goodbyes
(32:52):
to the exorcist, and returned to their car. There, the
woman said she felt better, lighter, like a weight had
been lifted from her, but that didn't mean she thought
she was cured, because before coming to Amman to meet
maua lump Slim, she had gone to the Uae and
had an exorcism there with another shake. But according to her,
after the ritual, the Jin had returned with a vengeance,
(33:14):
and unfortunately her story didn't end there. The respite she
got from the Black Prince of the Jin was only temporary,
and eventually she decided to travel to Indonesia to give
yet one more exorcist a try. While the young woman
(33:36):
in this story unfortunately wasn't able to rid herself of
the Jin that haunted her, she's lucky that the exorcist
she saw didn't resort to more extreme measures, because in
the world of gin, exorcism is perfectly acceptable to beat
a gin out of you. According to the thirteenth century
theologian Ibnthemia, it's permissible to strike a possessed person as
(33:57):
many strikes as it took to get rid of the gin,
because it was the gin who felt the pain of
the strikes, not the human, who, even Theamia said wouldn't
feel a thing, and the screams coming from the person
being beaten, well, no need to be concerned about those either,
because that was the jin screaming, not the human, which
means something must have gone very wrong. In the case
(34:20):
of Abdul Khalam, a forty eight year old Bangladeshi man
who died in February after an exorcism, abduk Alam had
been acting kind of strange lately, so the family thought
he might be suffering from a gin possession. They took
him to a local exorcist, who, along with his assistance,
held abdu ke Alam underwater until he nearly drowned, and
(34:42):
then beat him badly to drive the gin out. The
next day, Galam was found dead, having succumbed to his injuries.
The exorcist may have driven the gin out, but also
took Glam's life in the process. Charges were filed against
the exorcist, but he's not loan and having used possession
as an excuse to physically abuse a person. In fact,
(35:04):
a social worker in one British community told a reporter
that she had seen numerous times women who, when seeking
help to get out of abusive situations, be silenced by
others as being possessed, and she had also seen cases
in which family members or a spouse claiming a woman
was possessed by a gin beat her mercilessly. In other words,
(35:27):
gin possession was used both as an excuse to dismiss
allegations of abuse, but also as an excuse to actually
abuse these victims. Unfortunately, the world of gin possession and
exorcism is ripe for abuse, and a field like this
is also an open invitation to some who take advantage
of the desperate, especially because it can pay pretty well.
(35:50):
Like most things in life, jin exorcism is commodified. In
two thousand and twelve, the BBC reported a profile of
an East London exorcist named Abu Mohammed, with a video
showing him performing an actual exorcism. His waiting list is
many months long, and he charged back then around a
hundred dollars for a one hour session. Not too steep,
(36:13):
but not a bad source of income if you're booked
back to back for months. It's fair to say, though,
that his prices are on the low end of the
spectrum when you consider that Mohammad Yowafi, a famed Jordanian exorcist,
charges an average of three thousand dollars for an exorcism. Once, however,
he charged an Arab millionaire thirty thousand dollars to cleanse
(36:35):
his palatial residence of a Jin king and the king's
entire Jin army, which had apparently taken up residence there.
The millionaire was so happy with the results that he
gifted Yowaffe an expensive watch as an extra bonus. You'll
find Jin removers and exorcists all over the internet selling
their services, though traditionally the good ones don't need to advertise.
(36:59):
They're known by word of mouth, and if anything, they
prefer to work as privately as possible. And while some
may take advantage of people seeking answers, there are plenty
of them who are actually pretty committed and sincere in
wanting to help. They really believe that there are dark
forces that attack people, and they believe they can make
a difference, and sometimes they're able to serve an even
(37:21):
greater purpose in bringing people together in unexpected ways. Coptic
Christians and Muslims have lived side by side for centuries
in Egypt, and while at times political circumstances have led
to not just tension between the communities, but even unfortunately
actual violence. There is one certain space that has managed
to evade such crises, and that is the Church of
(37:44):
Father Samaan Ibraheim, one of the very few priests in
all of Egypt who is allowed to perform exorcisms, and
every week he performs mass exorcisms that draw people from
every walk of life and every faith to him. The
story of how Father Ibrahim came to this work is
a legend unto itself. Decades ago, he saw a vision
(38:07):
that inspired him to build a church for the people
who lived by the Kutham Mountain, a place itself connected
with miracles. That congregation in the nineteen seventies and today
consists of the poorest Christian community in the city, called
the Zabalein, which literally means garbage people. The Zabalein, nearly
(38:27):
all Christian, have for nearly a hundred years now, been
the city's primary garbage collectors and sorters, entire families making
their living by hauling away, sorting, and recycling mountains of trash,
and their largest community, around thirty thousand of them, live
in what is nicknamed Garbage City at the foot of
(38:47):
the Mautham Mountain, where Father Ibraheim established his church. It's
no ordinary church, though. The discovery nine of an incredible
cave under the mountain, a cave with pillars already made
to rock, was an answer to the priest's prayers. He
had been looking for an expansive area for worshippers to gather,
but finding no such space in the city crowded with
(39:10):
people in garbage. This cave was assigned from God to
gather under the earth itself, and so in that cave
was built what is now known as the Cave Cathedral,
and every Thursday night, live streaming online, thousands gather in
the Cave Cathedral, many of whom are Muslim, to get
Father Ibrahim's help in exercising their demons. Numerous news stories
(39:34):
have been written about these exorcisms, and in two thousand
and fourteen, a vice journalists decided to go witness one
for himself. He sat through a two hour rather ordinary
church service, after which spurts of howling rose from different
parts of the cathedral. Men and women apparently afflicted with
gin began clawing at the priest, begging for his attention
(39:55):
and for a few drops of the holy water that
he was throwing around. Muslim women with their heads covered
in hijab, lined up with bottles of water for the
priest to bless them with his own saliva. Others grunted
and groaned in the pews, thrashing around until the priest
laid his hands on them. The entire affair lasted about
twenty minutes, and the journalists who witnessed it didn't seem
(40:18):
all much impressed. But he asked one woman how she
felt after it seemed her demon had been banished. She
told him I feel great, thanks to God. The conclusion
reached by the journalist was this that we just view
the problems in our heads differently. Some see them as
mental or emotional health issues, and others as external forces
(40:39):
of good or evil. And so a gin exorcism, whether
or not an actual jin is a problem, or whether
or not the exorcism itself is real, is just one
way to bring some comfort to those who seek spiritual catharsis.
And as for the phenomena of possession itself, well, some
theorize it's a form of resistance to helplessness, cultural and
(41:03):
social restrictions, and bad personal situations. It can be a
pathway of empowerment to women who find spaces to dance
and smoke and drink and wield spiritual power during exorcism
rituals when they aren't able to do so anywhere else.
Or it could be an expression of powerless men unable
to overcome social expectations. Maybe for some, possession is an
(41:24):
instrument of expressing despair and anguish, of heartache and pain.
Remember the mother who was possessed for twelve years by
the Indian gin named mus Rooney. When the gin was
questioned about why, having lived inside of her for twelve years,
did he finally decide to manifest now, the gin told
the family it wasn't to torment the mother. Far from it.
(41:46):
He emerged as a lesson to them because they didn't
treat their mother right. A pretty convenient possession for the mom,
you could say. But if you're like me, it's still
hard to dismiss gin possession outright. And that's because you
can't really pick and choose how far you want to
go in your supernatural beliefs. Like I've said before, it's
(42:06):
kind of like being a little pregnant. Once you're in,
you're in. Once you believe there's something out there, something
we can't understand or ever fully know. Where do you
draw the line. If you believe ghosts, for example, are possible,
then why aren't fairies and UFOs and angels and demons
and God and Satan and yes Jin possible? And if
they're possible, how do you know what they can and
(42:28):
can't do, what they will and won't do? You don't,
and neither do I, because no matter how hard we try,
and believe me, people have been trying for thousands of years,
will never fully know the world of the Hidden Gin.
(42:53):
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,
(43:17):
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
(43:41):
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 g mail dot com and you might
(44:01):
just 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.
(44:24):
The Hidden 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
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Our theme song was created by Patrick Cortez.
(44:49):
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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