April 22, 2016 • 44 mins
Forget everything you learned about 'genies' from Aladdin - tales of the Jinn, also called Djinn, are ancient and not at all as family-friendly as Disney might have you believe. So what are these mysterious creatures, exactly? Join the guys as they delve into the strange story of smokeless fire, parallel worlds and hidden, sentient life.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Max, my
(00:22):
name is Noel, I'm Ben. You are you? And that
makes this stuff they don't want you to know. We
hope this podcast finds you amid Grand Adventure. If so,
we'd love to hear about it. So I'll just get
this out of the way because we talk about the
Twitter and the Facebook stuff usually at the end of
the show, right guys, Well, we'll just we'll just mention
here that if you haven't found us yet, please do.
(00:44):
We are conspiracy stuff on both Facebook and Twitter, and
that's one of the most immediate ways to contact us.
We would like to thank the listeners out there who
wrote to us several times over the past months and
asked us to cover this topic because it just kept
popping up in conversation, Right, yeah, we pop up in
conversation and on the fringes of a topic that we
(01:04):
were discussing. It came up I think in alchemy. I
remember you guys mentioning it and it came up in
a couple other places right before that too. I also
seem to recall it coming up one time where I
was like, all right, all Jin demons and Ben schooled
me real quick. So hopefully we'll get some more of
that school And oh, I don't know, we might get
schooled on this one, guys, we might. We might be
(01:25):
the ones going to school because this is one of
our This is an episode that's somewhere between a folklore episode,
a cryptic episode of possession episode. Jin run into a
lot of things, and first first we have to do
a disclaimer for this one. As Ben said, this is
an academic exploration of this topic about the folklore behind
(01:49):
the what a gin is, what Jin are, and we're
not We're not trying to persuade anybody to look at
anything in a certain way, especially uh, to ascribe to
any certain set of beliefs or anything like that. And
our goal is not to confirm or deny anyone's religious beliefs. Right,
your spiritual convictions, as always, are your own. So let's
(02:10):
get into this exploration. This is fascinated the three of
us for a long time. If you grew up in
the West and are not uh, practitioner of Islam or
not familiar with some of the beliefs surrounding the Middle
East and other related parts of the world, then you
probably have some very specific ideas of what a jin
(02:33):
or a genie is. Oh sure, I mean a lot
of my beliefs come from pop culture, from movies, television, books, comics,
things where it would be a genie usually spelled with
a G, sometimes spelled with a J. As in the
case that I had dream of genie. Yes, yes, exactly,
that's back from the sixties. That's always the image I
had of what it looked like inside the lamp. She
(02:54):
had cushions everywhere, and it was like this built in
like you know, it looked like a really sweet RV
or something, you know, like with shag carpeting, you know,
like it was. It was super nice. Yeah, well then
you go you go to you know, horror films that
look at genie's Like wish Master was one that I've
watched when I was younger. I probably shouldn't have watched
it back then. Wasn't a West Craven movie. I think
(03:17):
Wes Craven was part of he produced it or something. Um. Yeah,
but then we get to Aladdin, the Disney movie, which
you know, I don't know but you guys, but I
was quoting that movie for years. Yeah. Man, I had
that soundtrack on CD. It's a fantastic It's just a
fantastic film. We watched it recently, and that that holds
up for a film film? Yeah, well yeah it was film. Uh.
(03:39):
And then you you know, you move a little bit
forward and you get to video games, where there are
different types of jin's uh that I've encountered in many
a virtual world. You probably have too. So what do
we know about what these gins are from these things?
I have to say, I think he passed over a
very important gen Snoop Dogg's Gin and Juice. Oh sorry,
(03:59):
I also passed over because am you know? Oh we
forgot Kazam Yeah, Shack, thank you narrowly avoided the email
on that one from Shack himself. So what do we
know about genies from those pieces of pop culture? Well,
here's some of the main I guess we can call
them tropes that have been established about your standard run
of the mill genie jin who call it what you will, uh.
(04:23):
One Often they are imprisoned inside a material artifact, usually
a ring, or you know, typically a lamp, and I
guess it could be really anything, could be perhaps a
chest of some kind, like a book even you know,
you see different versions. Remember um the care Bears movie
where there was this creepy green faced ghost thing trapped
(04:45):
inside of a book and made the magician's assistant like,
do weird stuff? I do not. I would argue that
that is a gin in a way, because it's sort
of imprisons inside this artifact. Anyway, I digress. That always
scare the crap out of when I was a kid,
that felt like very intense film. What I saw was
really intense. Yeah, anyway, So that's that's that's a huge
(05:06):
part of it. Number two. Typically they grant wishes with
perilous outcomes and think of even like in films, you
have like an evil like apparition that can say I
can make this happen for you, you know, but then
other things fall apart as a result of it. You know.
That's not really what we think of when we think
of a Laddin, you know. But that usually those wishes
were I want to be the king or I want
(05:28):
to be you know, Prince Ali or whatever, and that
all worked out. But there are well, there are things
that go wrong along the way trying to get this wish,
but doesn't necessarily have this built in catastrophe like this
one to one like you wish that makes something horrible
has has happened to somebody else, so um the perilous
outcomes definitely different versions of that. And finally, I mean
a really common perception of this genie type of gin
(05:52):
um is that they have magical powers, you know, can
shape shift. And to me, something that it always sticks
with for me is that they have a master that
once they appear to them, they are bound to that
master until they have used up some finite number of wishes.
Interesting stuff, you know, because what we're talking about now
(06:13):
would be again these Western conceptions. We have baseballers on
pop culture probably one of the biggest popularizers of the
of Jin folklore. The concept of jinn comes to us
from uh Shahrazad and the thousand and one Stories, right,
or excuse me, a thousand and one Arabian Nights. But
(06:34):
before we go into the actual world or belief system
involving gin I have to ask you, guys, because I
can't let it go listeners. You may have heard me
accidentally humming part of this song as as Nolan that
we're talking, what's your favorite song from the Aladdined soundtrack? Oh? Man,
(06:56):
do you have one? Musically, I'm really fond of the
Arabian Nights song. Um, it's got a really cool melody,
very evocative. I do think that's interesting. When I watched
rewatched Aladdin recently, the lyrics changed a little bit, couple
a couple of lines. Serious. No, No, there was just
I remember when it came out and I have the
(07:17):
soundtrack and there's a line in the song where it
says talking about you know what it's like in this
part of the world, And there's a line that says
where they cut off your hand if they don't like
your face. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home. And they
they changed that. It's not that lyric anymore. Do you
think those do maybe to post nine eleven. I'm not
(07:38):
sure when it happened, but um, you know, someone definitely
in and somewhere along that process found that line to
be offensive. So do you think maybe it was just
a censorship thing where they said that line is too
too much for kids as Yeah, that's what that's what
I would think. I mean, because you gotta think too.
That movie has been re issued probably several times. I
(08:00):
also you should see at what point did that happened?
But we digress, But we digress, So let's digress further.
Is let's digress all the way to the beginning, as
as the Mad Hatter said to Alice, started at the beginning,
go through the middle, and stop at the end. Jin
(08:20):
smelled j i in in in English, sometimes d j
i in in the root of genies this concept. Let's
look at the word first set amology. It's often said
to come from an Arabic root word meaning to hide,
and some interpretations take this a little bit further to
mean beings who are concealed from the senses. Uh Jin
(08:43):
is the plural. The singular would be genie j i
n i, and that's where genie comes from. But uh
it when it was anglicized in some places, people took
it to mean a guardian of a specific place. And
while these are popular theories there, there are also competing
(09:06):
theories or interpretations, one saying that one saying that Genie
or the concept originally came from what we're seen as
demons or evil spirits in early Christian or Judeo Christian beliefs.
But unlike some other supernatural beings, uh Jin are actually
(09:30):
mentioned in the Koran. They have an origin story right um.
In the Koran, God actually makes three sapient forms of life, angels,
gen and humans. Men were made of clay, angels from light,
and Jin are described as being made of a smokeless
scorching fire, which is sort of Sinister's tunding if you
(09:53):
ask me crazy stuff. Like humans, Jin have free will,
some are Muslim and some are not hunt and like humans,
Jin being capable of good and bad, will be judged
by God on the Day of Judgment and sent to
Hell or to Paradise as their actions accord. But here's
the thing. Although Jin are mentioned in the Koran, they
(10:16):
were believed in before the before Islam they were They
were pre Islamic originally, and in some cases there's some
evidence that they were maybe gods or at least spirits
that were paid tribute to uh In. In Palmira, for example, Yeah,
there's this Aramaic inscription at a place called beth Fasil
(10:40):
which pays tribute to the genie spelled g I n
in a y e as the good and rewarding gods.
So until about the fourth century as we rate time today, Uh,
many of the populations that were in the Middle East
practice a different polytheistic religions. There were there were significant
(11:04):
Jewish and later Christian minorities that developed, but Polytheism remained
the dominant belief system in pre Islamic Arabia and Jin,
which started in some cases being worshiped as gods, are
thought to have later been downgraded to lesser status as
spirits as demons, especially after the religious waves of monotheism. Yeah,
(11:28):
I can see that you demonize the gods that came prior.
I understand that. Well, there's religious syncretism to write. Uh,
the idea that the idea that when a religion is
growing or spreading, it says, well, these other things that
exist do exist, and we're not. What what we're doing
is we're showing you why they exist. They're also part
(11:51):
of this belief system, which is the one true belief system.
Is typically how a lot of religions handle it. So
where do Jin hang out? A lot of times they're
in dark places. That maybe why when the west owners
came along to create stories out of this, they put
him in a lamp that's really dark, or in a
you know, a ring, or in a cave or something
(12:12):
like that, lost as well, like sort of like they're
buried like like you know, U totally shut away, as
if they were not ever meant to be discovered again
kind of thing. Yes, and again because they're supposed to
be isolated, right right, And if we could talk just
a little bit about the idea of where the artifact
belief comes in. Solomon was King Solomon's thought to command
(12:35):
spirits that were a type of jin through the use
of a ring, right, the Ring of Solomon, which I
think also still shows up in pop culture. Right, yeah, Oh,
the that ring is everywhere. I I would say, and
I don't know if this is true because I haven't
looked too much into it, but the one ring to
rule them all, I think that might have like have
(12:55):
some kickbacks Mr Solomon. And then also the also we
should mention the Grimoires or the books of magic known
as the Key of Solomon or the lesser Keys of Solomon,
also thought to contain rituals which, when performed properly, allow
one to communicate with and or control these spirits. Uh,
(13:18):
Matt Nolan, I have not attempted to do this as
far as I know, speak for yourself, sir, Okay, okay,
Matt and Noel have attempted to do this. I don't
want to put you guys on glass and ask too
much about how how it worked out. That that doesn't
change one way or the other. So the the idea here,
(13:43):
which I thought was fascinating, and I'm speculating here. I
wanted to ask you listeners because I couldn't find any
solid proof of this. But we're there jin cults like
what other than you know, other than being a statue
or shrine one would pay trip be two where they're
actually religious systems that were large built on worshiping maybe
(14:06):
one or two creatures or gods that would later become gin.
I don't know, but it's interesting. Well yeah, and it
wouldn't have to be it wouldn't have to be that
large to be a cult of a certain gin, especially
if it was worshiped, you know, for hundreds and hundreds
of years for a while there as a god. Then
everything broke off as the new religions came through, and
(14:26):
then they you know, maybe an isolated group somewhere. I
can totally imagine that I can also see like maybe
there's like a rogue gin, you know, who wants to
like become more like a god and then command his
own followers. I could just see that in terms of
like folklore. Oh yeah, that happens, and we'll get to
it just a second. I think we'll really appreciate this part.
(14:46):
Before we get to that, let's talk about the different
types of gin, because not all are created equal. Some
have specialties, some are automatically evil, some could go either way.
But as we go into this, do you want to
abolished that? The folklore gets kind of sticky because there
are creatures or beings in other and other regions or
(15:08):
and sometimes even in other belief systems that are considered gin.
And then there there are arguments that people will have
over whether that whether one type of creature should be
considered a subclass of gin or its own thing. Well,
that being said, jen are smart, have social organizations, uh
(15:30):
in their community. They have kings, they have laws of marriages,
they have births, you know, all the normal days of
our lives stuff. They just but while humans cannot perceive gen,
apparently they can perceive the human world. So this it's
(15:50):
an interesting idea because it means that there is an
invisible world occurring all around us, and we are in
some sort of glass house of existence or some sort
of one way mirror. Yeah, there there are a few
planes of existence up than we are, and somehow they
can see down, but the mirror only goes one way.
That's cool. So one common belief in Muslim lord list. Again,
(16:16):
this list is not This list is not universally accepted.
But let's let's look at the various types of jenn.
The first would be uh the mariad or married m
A R I D. And I do apologize for pronunciation
of Arabic here uh. In Lane's Arabic English lexicon, these
(16:41):
types of jin are said to be the strongest, the
ones of great power uh in in the in the
Lanes lexicon. They're actually said to be evil, but this
isn't universally agreed on. These are the ones we think.
I only think of the genie in Aladdin, the ability
to do all these powerful things, even unto granting wishes,
(17:03):
if you flatter them enough, if they like you, if
you do something for them. Uh. And that's so, that's
what people in the West generally think about. But that's
not all of the gin in the world. Now you
also have an affret and this is one that I
have heard of before. You may have heard of this
(17:24):
as well. It's often described as this enormous winged creature
of fire. Think of phoenix almost in my head, and
that's what I'm seeing. Can be either sex, male or female.
It lives ground, underground, and a lot of times it
will it will fly around ruins of someplace where tragedy
(17:44):
has occurred or war has been fought, or you know,
where something has where something has occurred where perhaps there
was death. And then we get to it's called the
shad or the shy time U s h i t
a n s h a y t a. And this
this goes exactly to what you were talking about. And also, uh,
(18:06):
the concept is like this that during the creation of
the world, there is one jin that refuses to bow
to God and its name is Iblis. Sounds familiar, sounds
a little like, Oh, I don't know, was that the church,
(18:26):
lady Revercott, I don't know, was it. So this is
that this would be considered the devil in the Qoran,
and the devil had followers Jin who decided to side
with iblis uh. And it's it's interesting because while there
are parallels, they are you know, there are differences as well.
(18:50):
The primary thing here is that these creatures which sometimes
are not considered jin but simply demons. Depending upon which
scholar you're talking to or which book you're basing it on,
is it based on the Koran? Is it based on
earlier like folklore, right, academic studies, So there are going
to be differences in interpretation here, but the main thing
(19:11):
that always stays the same is that these are the
bad guys nice, they're not cool? Uh? And then speaking yeah,
speaking of not cool, there's something else the google. So
I guess that's where that word comes from. Yes, yeah,
just so. Yeah. Nowadays we think of gooules as the
(19:33):
um as similar to a vampire, right, these undead creatures
usually that eat flesh rather than drink blood for sustenance.
And goblins is what I see. I see two d
little pixelated things. They tend to travel by shambling, yes,
the primary form of locomotion. I actually think. I play
(19:54):
the Fallout series a lot and really enjoy those. And
there is a whole um you know, group of arcters
called ghouls and they've basically been irradiated to the point
where there they look like you know, zombies, but they
don't necessarily eat flesh unless they've kind of passed a
threshold and then they get to a point where they
will be exactly they're called feral ghouls. Exactly do they
(20:15):
have do they have any profound abilities or they just
rotting people? Um? It depends. Like there are some that
are so irradiated that they can actually shoot like radiation
energy a you and like vomit like you know, radiate
radioactive goo. Um. But you know, some of the ones
that are that are still more or less human, they
you know, run taverns things like that. You know, so
(20:37):
that the ghouls that we're talking about are a little different,
I know, but I love those guls. There are several
that you interact with in the third one that make
you very happy. Uh. But these these a lot of
times will inhabit a graveyard, right. There are other places
that just there's no humans. And this type of jen
(20:57):
has been said to be sired by it bliss, so
not siding with this uh, diabolical character against God, but
to have been created by this diabolical character. And then
there is the gen j a n n uh thought
of as the weakest type of jin. So a few
(21:19):
traditions divide gin into three classes, those who have wings
and fly in the air, those who resemble snakes and dogs,
and those who simply travel ceaselessly. But they've also been
described as creatures of different forms vultures, snakes, others like humanoid.
They might even be dragons or a number of other animals.
(21:39):
And and it said that some of these can shape
shift right, right, So that would maybe another reason why
we have so many different depictions of animals, and very
widely varying animals. And let's talk about gin and magic.
Did did you think I was gonna say, jen and juice?
I was really hoping. I was hoping I would to
(22:01):
hope springs eternal. I guess that will be for afterwork, right. Uh.
In folklore, of course, these beings are often associated with magic,
its concept that exists in the modern day still as
the old rub a magic lamp, get some wishes bits.
And we mentioned that, uh, certain historical humans like King
Solomon were said to control jin, and in some ways
(22:26):
acts of magic entirely have been described as a magician
entering into some sort of contract with one or more
of these beings of Gin and worshiping them, or I
guess paying some sort of obeesience in order to receive information.
That's one of the big ones about unknown things, so
(22:49):
Claire sentience, clairvoyance, or to receive riches power. Well, you know,
the whole standard, the usual, the usual, uh, supervillain starter package.
And you've got some lines from the Koran here I
had mentioned Iblis, right, we mentioned Iblis, who would be
Satan in in this story, Satan didn't follow or Iblis
(23:12):
didn't follow God's command to prostrate himself unto man. So
he still he still wouldn't play ball, but he said,
I'm not the one to prostrate myself to a human being,
because you know, you made him out of clay. And
then to which point God said get out. And the
(23:33):
existence of jin, as mentioned in the Koran, matters immensely,
maybe more so than you might think, because for many
people they would say, well, Matt Noel Ben, this is interesting,
but this is folklore. Why are you talking about it?
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. Here's
(24:03):
where it gets crazy. You see, belief in jin is
not something restricted two thousands of years ago. It is
not something that exists distant chronologically. There is a modern
belief in Jin. There are like people across the world
(24:24):
believe that Jin are real, yeah, and they want to
prove that it's real through science. Right. Though not all
Muslims believe in Jin, many do and some universities published
research and hold workshops seeking to prove the existence of
Jin and argue how they exist in the modern world
or how science can help humanity understand the nature of
(24:47):
these beings. So an example would be from Jin Invade
Campus by Purvis Hood boy Um a workshop quote. A
workshop title Jin's and Black Magic was organized in Islamabad
by the Department of Humanities at the Compstats Institute of Technology,
which is the s c I i T, one of
Pakistan's largest universities. The invited speaker, Razab xil Hawk, introduced
(25:09):
as a spiritual cardiologist, is reputedly an expert on demonic
possessions and evil spirits. So this is an elite university
in Pakistan. So this this is an active area of studying. Right.
It's it's very important to say, for instance, unlike um,
(25:31):
unlike what what would another thing be? Fairies or you know, uh,
imagine inserts supernatural being here. Uh, it's it's not as uh,
it's not as derided as those kinds of beliefs. Or
it's kind of like an an angels expert came to
speak at Harvard or something as imagining. Yeah, that's not
(25:51):
a bad comparison, you know, or at M I T
or something. So while proposing theories about the nature of JEN,
these researchers and academics have at times have a time said, well,
science can help us understand these we're there, you'll see
references to maybe microorganisms or parallel universes or forms of
(26:12):
imperceivable energy and higher frequencies. At this point, the concept
of GIN is not scientifically accepted in the West or
many non Muslim parts of the world. And again we
want to emphasize we're not painting with a broad brush here.
We're saying nothing about all people of a specific religion,
where what we are establishing instead is that people in
(26:34):
the modern world today, as you listen to this, believe
that jin exists. And that's not just that they don't
just exist as some sort of passive, watchful entities, right
that you can maybe get some wishes out of if
you have the right ring or the right lamp, they
have agency, they have the ability to do things in
(26:54):
the human world to humans. And this is kind of
the disturbing part. No, man, if you like, there's plenty
of Christians that would say the same thing about angels,
I think that's an excellent point. Yeah, no, absolutely, But
the creepy thing here is what if these things do
exist and they can possess humans to cause humans to
(27:15):
do things that they normally wouldn't, perhaps to influence something politically,
a movement or something like that. I that's one of
the beliefs, right right, Yeah, there's this belief that jin
are able to possess human beings. And this this is
a weird thing. So you can go right now on
(27:36):
YouTube and see footage of what what are said to
be exorcisms. And we we talked about this a little
bit in a previous episode when we cover the differences
between exorcisms around the world. You know, like the the
Catholic Church has a very specific right and and uh
and in Islam there are specific rights as well. You
(28:01):
can also find people who are you know, who are
describing the signs of possession by a jin or the
signs of someone trafficking and magic the sign that you
have encountered somehow a jin, and the possession is typically
exorcised through uh the recitation of the Koran, seeking refuge, remembrance,
(28:24):
and supplicators uh as. It's also a way that other
sicknesses or problems might be addressed. And I really like
people to check out our our previous episode on exorcism
because we had an interesting conversation that I guess we
won't get into too much here, but I want to
know what you folks think is possession real in your experience,
(28:49):
because we know that historically signs of mental illness were
mistaken for possession. We know that signs of grief or
maybe psychotic breaks or maybe even mental disabilities all mistaken
for possession at some point in the past, which is
a horrific thing. But according to people who believe this,
Jim Jin possession is something that experts can clearly discern
(29:14):
and through the use of these techniques drive drive the
jin out, and unlike demons possessing people in Catholic or
Christian belief systems, jin are not necessarily evil. Yeah, that's
a huge difference. They have free will, so I was
looking at in the course of research, I was looking at, uh,
(29:37):
some some scholars, some Islamic scholars, talking about Jin possession,
and one of the big reasons for possession, according to
some of these sources was love, like a jin being
in love with a human, with the human that they're possessing,
or with another human that they're possessing a to get
(29:59):
to be either way. What if we take it back
a step to our early description of kind of the
preconceived ideas of a genie or a gin, and as
we've gotten to where we are now in the podcast,
I think we've sort of taking that apart a little bit.
And I'm just wondering, is that do you consider that
(30:19):
version those points we made about you know, being chained
to a an artifact of sub sort and you know,
granting wishes and things like that and ultimately being a
force for kind of chaos based on what happens when
those wishes are granted. Is all that just from kind
of like whitewashed like re tellings of you know, folk
stories and made to be more palatable for a wider audience,
(30:42):
sort of like in the same way that you know,
grim fairy tales were much much nastier, and then they're
sort of retooled. You know, that's a really interesting question.
What do you think, man, I would say, that's exactly
what's happened, because we've got one specific type of gin
that are being described by most of the pular culture
that the ma read. I don't know how to say
(31:03):
it correctly. I think it's the mariad uh. And you know,
so you've got that one particular story and then you
kind of expand out and say, well, this is what
all genies are like when you look at it through
the lens. I think that's what's happening. Yeah, I can
see the religious syncretism occurring there as well. And it's
also important for us to note that modern belief in
(31:26):
jin is not necessarily unique in in that um. Just
in the process of this sort of belief. For instance,
there are other persistent beliefs in things that you know,
the rest of the world will call supernatural rather than factual.
Ghost of ancestors are still commonly venerated in religions around
the world, and then invisible elves in Iceland. You guys
(31:50):
heard about that, right, They they're real, guys. I think
they're real. The who do folk uh these elves in
Icelandic folklore. The belief is so commonplace, or purportedly so commonplace,
that it affects modern construction. Also, I one thing that
(32:12):
fascinates me is when when people look at beliefs in spirits,
and you know, there are some people who can put
up a very strong argument that jin are not spirits
so much as they are another type of living thinking being.
(32:33):
You know, because they do live, they're not undead. So
this stuff astonishes and amazes me, both the growth of
the folklore to the modern day beliefs. And I know
for certain that it is easy for some people to
feel maybe condescending in some way and say, oh, look
(32:57):
at this outdated belief And I live in the modern age.
And because I live in the modern age, I know
better than these people who believe differently For me, but
especially if you live in the developed world, I would
ask you, uh to examine some of the common beliefs
we have. Future historians are going to think that we
(33:18):
were so foolish when we explained the following situation. Yes,
back in the day, we used to hop into these
machines the way thousands and thousands of pounds and we're
we're powered by explosions internally. And we would drive within
feet of each other because we called it driving, and
they would say, well, hey, wait, how did you do
it safely? And we said, well, we had this honor system.
(33:40):
You see. We painted lines on places where we would
drive and we just said we wouldn't hit each other.
And would say, oh, but so is that how you
avoided accidents and would say no, no, accidents happened constantly, constantly.
We we just we believed we were safer but got hurt, right, right,
So I wouldn't. What I'm saying is that it is
(34:02):
an error for anyone me, Noel, Matt you perhaps listener
to assume that we have the conclusive and final answer
on what we believe in the worth of what we believe, right,
(34:22):
So I would say, we have to be very careful
not to cast dispersions or stones. You know, if I'm
in Iceland and somebody tells me not to mess with
the rock because something lives there. Yeah, whether or not
I personally believe, I'm not gonna launch into some lecture
you know, about the nature of geology. Uh, And this
(34:44):
this is where we leave it. We are a world
filled to the brim with people. There are billions of
us and amongst those billions, depending on who you believe
and what you're reading, there exists billions more unseen things
(35:04):
that in terms of philosophy and mental ability, quite similar
to us. So just like our earlier, earlier work on
coded languages, you know, again there's this invisible world and
more and more I think about it, we're running into
these concepts of invisible worlds. We talked about train hoppers
(35:26):
and some things as serial killer cults, when we talked
about jin So that's that's really what I see us
going into. More and more are these ideas of hidden
worlds and this concept of what we can and cannot prove.
But I have a question, uh for you guys listeners,
do you have any in your neck of the woods.
(35:47):
Do you have any um popular folklore beliefs in unseen
or supernatural beings? And if so, do you believe the stories? Why?
Could you tell us some pacifics? Yeah? Do you have
any anecdotes where you maybe have had an encounter? I
don't want to hear those, yeah, that you could or
could not explain. And I'd like to close on a
(36:10):
question for you guys, if if we each had a
wish and it would and you couldn't wish for more wishes,
what would your wish be? Oh man, this is tough.
I think I would probably. I mean there's two there.
You can split it down the middle. You can go
for like a very self serving wish, or you could
(36:31):
go for a wish that helps others. But then you
get into that situation where it's all about the language.
It's all about the wording of the wish, really careful,
you know, because you might say I want world peace
and it means that everyone dies, right. Or you might
say you might say I want to live forever, and
you do, but you still age and everywhere, trap somewhere,
and all your loved ones die around you. Um, I
(36:53):
guess I would just I would wish I would do
some of some very carefully worded version of just you know,
just wanting to never you know, like be able to
always make sure I can take care of my family
and myself and just have maybe not absurd wealth, but
(37:15):
just be comfortable all the time and never have to
worry about paying bills and anything of that nature. Just
have some sort of like maybe maybe it's a magic
platinum card that you can just pay for everything with
and you never get a bill, you know, something like that.
I know that's very selfish and boring, but I just
feel like the world case one would you know, could
(37:35):
potentially be disastrous. I would ask for a single, let's say,
a single tomato plant that always has tomatoes on it. Always,
no matter how many tories you take from the plant,
there's always more tomatoes. It's like you gets sick of tomatoes.
I don't care, man, and I will never and yeah
(38:00):
this caveat at the end, I will never never get
sick of I can always sell the tomatoes, saying have
you been going through some tomato related shenanigans? Man? Are
you okay? I was trying to imagine something that would
be super manageable, that would be small. I was trying
to think of ways that it could hurt me. Don't
think you have to tomatoes? And you you didn't mention
(38:21):
the size of the planet, so what if it's so huge?
It's okay. We we don't have a gen in the room.
What about you, Ben? I have no idea, and I'm
not sure I want to reveal that much about my personality,
but I would Okay, I would probably wish for in
(38:43):
a very carefully worded way, as Noel said, I would
wish for uh, some series of superpowers and try to
sneak them all in as like the same thing. My
one wish would be a run on sentence obviously, just
a c y A right, And then I would try
to use those powers to make the world a better place,
(39:04):
because it's all about the journey, isn't it. And uh,
And I also think I'm also concerned, just in this
fictional world of granted wishes, I also wonder if there's
some higher chance or likelihood of things going wrong if
the wish affects more people. So maybe if you just
wish for something for yourself and then use that to
(39:25):
affect a larger change, it's safer, It's really good. Ben
Even something like invisibility, Let's think about how often that
comes into play as being the ultimate power to get
things done, you know what I mean. So you could
certainly affect some change with invisibility. You could sneak into
so many places in Bermuda in Singapore, and you could
do the next Panama papers. I would well, you know
(39:47):
that's the thing. Would you be invisible to the human eye,
in visible to everything? Could you wear clothes because I
don't want to try to see you want to be
invisible at will to all? You just fall through the
map listeners that listeners. Uh you know, Matt and I
wish you guys could see the way that Nole's eyes
(40:09):
lit up when they said through all that was great.
Uh yeah, I would go for invulnerability teleportation. I would
say psionic powers, just so I could get all of them.
Just say all the X Men. That's all you have
to say. Oh no, man, there's some X Men. You
weren't that great, but that that gen is gonna call
Shenanigans on that wish though, dude, Like I mean, it's
(40:31):
like the man, come on, yeah, they've seen it all.
They can't. You can't do that. They pick one be
an immortal and then they would plush you with their
giant thumb. Yeah, or maybe it'll short circuit. It'll say,
you know, I've had a hard week. Been the best
thing you do is a cheese steak, And I'll say, thanks, dude,
cool man, I appreciate it. Never ending cheese steak. When
(40:55):
never ending cheese steak, Oh dude, that's crazy. You could
feed the world with one. She's steak that never ends.
I think, you know, I think we're optimistic here and
we're thinking of we're thinking of the best possible outcomes.
But I'm gonna spend some time, Uh, I'm gonna spend
(41:16):
some time pondering what a decent wish would be and
how you would write it. We hope that you enjoyed
this episode. Ladies and gentlemen. What kind of stuff would
you wish for? And please do remember to tell us
about what kind of things are beings you've heard about
in your neck of the global woods. We want to
hear from you. And speaking of hearing from you, it's
(41:38):
time for shut ut corners. Yes, that's right, shout out
corner the moment in every show where we shout out
listeners who request said shout out um. First today we
have one for East Bay, newt A k A muti
uh he or she is interested hearing more about Planet nine,
(42:02):
and I fear I can't help with that, can you?
What's what's those? It's the proposed ninth planet that we
found in the Solar System that's out over there by Pluto,
way out there. I missed that one, guys. I want
to know more too. It hasn't been confirmed yet, but
it's we're pretty sure there's something there from from the
(42:23):
the way the other planets move. Well, let's dig into it.
That's an excellent suggestion, Thank you, NUTI. Our next shout
out is from Justin for this quote, specifically, the best
way to find a needle in a haystack is to
set the hay on fire. This goes back to our
earlier conversation about the Panama papers. And you can find Justin.
(42:44):
He is at math math anug and that's m A
T h A in U g G if you want
to follow him. And here more interesting quotes if I
remember correctly, though, I think the analogy we used was
a needle and a pile of needles, but unfortunately needles
are not flammable. In that case, it was needles on needles.
And finally today shout out to Debbie's utant. I think
(43:07):
I'm saying that correctly. She wrote to us on Facebook.
She said very nice things, and she also said, if
we are ever in the Florida Keys, gentlemen, we are
invited out to her bar where she bartends, and she
will she said, we will have an extra special time,
I guess because she would get us drunk. Game on.
(43:27):
All right, Well, that's all from us for to day.
Ladies and gentlemen. Please check out our video on jin Uh.
Please also stay tuned to hear what topics recovery next.
We do a live show about once a week and
you can ask us anything. Typically we're over on Facebook now, right, guys,
that's correct. We're hanging out on Facebook all the time.
(43:48):
We're gonna be throwing some more videos up there very soon.
Oh what is the date right now? Guys? Two more days.
We have a very special classic episode that we're gonna
put up on Facebook very soon and you'll know why.
And in the meantime, if you have any ideas for
upcoming topics we should cover, we would love to hear
from you. Take a page out of Nudie, Justin and
(44:10):
Debbie's book and drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter,
or don't like the social media rigormar role and you've
got a longer story to tell us, We love to
hear that as well. You can email us directly. We
are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Max, my
(00:22):
name is Noel, I'm Ben. You are you? And that
makes this stuff they don't want you to know. We
hope this podcast finds you amid Grand Adventure. If so,
we'd love to hear about it. So I'll just get
this out of the way because we talk about the
Twitter and the Facebook stuff usually at the end of
the show, right guys, Well, we'll just we'll just mention
here that if you haven't found us yet, please do.
(00:44):
We are conspiracy stuff on both Facebook and Twitter, and
that's one of the most immediate ways to contact us.
We would like to thank the listeners out there who
wrote to us several times over the past months and
asked us to cover this topic because it just kept
popping up in conversation, Right, yeah, we pop up in
conversation and on the fringes of a topic that we
(01:04):
were discussing. It came up I think in alchemy. I
remember you guys mentioning it and it came up in
a couple other places right before that too. I also
seem to recall it coming up one time where I
was like, all right, all Jin demons and Ben schooled
me real quick. So hopefully we'll get some more of
that school And oh, I don't know, we might get
schooled on this one, guys, we might. We might be
(01:25):
the ones going to school because this is one of
our This is an episode that's somewhere between a folklore episode,
a cryptic episode of possession episode. Jin run into a
lot of things, and first first we have to do
a disclaimer for this one. As Ben said, this is
an academic exploration of this topic about the folklore behind
(01:49):
the what a gin is, what Jin are, and we're
not We're not trying to persuade anybody to look at
anything in a certain way, especially uh, to ascribe to
any certain set of beliefs or anything like that. And
our goal is not to confirm or deny anyone's religious beliefs. Right,
your spiritual convictions, as always, are your own. So let's
(02:10):
get into this exploration. This is fascinated the three of
us for a long time. If you grew up in
the West and are not uh, practitioner of Islam or
not familiar with some of the beliefs surrounding the Middle
East and other related parts of the world, then you
probably have some very specific ideas of what a jin
(02:33):
or a genie is. Oh sure, I mean a lot
of my beliefs come from pop culture, from movies, television, books, comics,
things where it would be a genie usually spelled with
a G, sometimes spelled with a J. As in the
case that I had dream of genie. Yes, yes, exactly,
that's back from the sixties. That's always the image I
had of what it looked like inside the lamp. She
(02:54):
had cushions everywhere, and it was like this built in
like you know, it looked like a really sweet RV
or something, you know, like with shag carpeting, you know,
like it was. It was super nice. Yeah, well then
you go you go to you know, horror films that
look at genie's Like wish Master was one that I've
watched when I was younger. I probably shouldn't have watched
it back then. Wasn't a West Craven movie. I think
(03:17):
Wes Craven was part of he produced it or something. Um. Yeah,
but then we get to Aladdin, the Disney movie, which
you know, I don't know but you guys, but I
was quoting that movie for years. Yeah. Man, I had
that soundtrack on CD. It's a fantastic It's just a
fantastic film. We watched it recently, and that that holds
up for a film film? Yeah, well yeah it was film. Uh.
(03:39):
And then you you know, you move a little bit
forward and you get to video games, where there are
different types of jin's uh that I've encountered in many
a virtual world. You probably have too. So what do
we know about what these gins are from these things?
I have to say, I think he passed over a
very important gen Snoop Dogg's Gin and Juice. Oh sorry,
(03:59):
I also passed over because am you know? Oh we
forgot Kazam Yeah, Shack, thank you narrowly avoided the email
on that one from Shack himself. So what do we
know about genies from those pieces of pop culture? Well,
here's some of the main I guess we can call
them tropes that have been established about your standard run
of the mill genie jin who call it what you will, uh.
(04:23):
One Often they are imprisoned inside a material artifact, usually
a ring, or you know, typically a lamp, and I
guess it could be really anything, could be perhaps a
chest of some kind, like a book even you know,
you see different versions. Remember um the care Bears movie
where there was this creepy green faced ghost thing trapped
(04:45):
inside of a book and made the magician's assistant like,
do weird stuff? I do not. I would argue that
that is a gin in a way, because it's sort
of imprisons inside this artifact. Anyway, I digress. That always
scare the crap out of when I was a kid,
that felt like very intense film. What I saw was
really intense. Yeah, anyway, So that's that's that's a huge
(05:06):
part of it. Number two. Typically they grant wishes with
perilous outcomes and think of even like in films, you
have like an evil like apparition that can say I
can make this happen for you, you know, but then
other things fall apart as a result of it. You know.
That's not really what we think of when we think
of a Laddin, you know. But that usually those wishes
were I want to be the king or I want
(05:28):
to be you know, Prince Ali or whatever, and that
all worked out. But there are well, there are things
that go wrong along the way trying to get this wish,
but doesn't necessarily have this built in catastrophe like this
one to one like you wish that makes something horrible
has has happened to somebody else, so um the perilous
outcomes definitely different versions of that. And finally, I mean
a really common perception of this genie type of gin
(05:52):
um is that they have magical powers, you know, can
shape shift. And to me, something that it always sticks
with for me is that they have a master that
once they appear to them, they are bound to that
master until they have used up some finite number of wishes.
Interesting stuff, you know, because what we're talking about now
(06:13):
would be again these Western conceptions. We have baseballers on
pop culture probably one of the biggest popularizers of the
of Jin folklore. The concept of jinn comes to us
from uh Shahrazad and the thousand and one Stories, right,
or excuse me, a thousand and one Arabian Nights. But
(06:34):
before we go into the actual world or belief system
involving gin I have to ask you, guys, because I
can't let it go listeners. You may have heard me
accidentally humming part of this song as as Nolan that
we're talking, what's your favorite song from the Aladdined soundtrack? Oh? Man,
(06:56):
do you have one? Musically, I'm really fond of the
Arabian Nights song. Um, it's got a really cool melody,
very evocative. I do think that's interesting. When I watched
rewatched Aladdin recently, the lyrics changed a little bit, couple
a couple of lines. Serious. No, No, there was just
I remember when it came out and I have the
(07:17):
soundtrack and there's a line in the song where it
says talking about you know what it's like in this
part of the world, And there's a line that says
where they cut off your hand if they don't like
your face. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home. And they
they changed that. It's not that lyric anymore. Do you
think those do maybe to post nine eleven. I'm not
(07:38):
sure when it happened, but um, you know, someone definitely
in and somewhere along that process found that line to
be offensive. So do you think maybe it was just
a censorship thing where they said that line is too
too much for kids as Yeah, that's what that's what
I would think. I mean, because you gotta think too.
That movie has been re issued probably several times. I
(08:00):
also you should see at what point did that happened?
But we digress, But we digress, So let's digress further.
Is let's digress all the way to the beginning, as
as the Mad Hatter said to Alice, started at the beginning,
go through the middle, and stop at the end. Jin
(08:20):
smelled j i in in in English, sometimes d j
i in in the root of genies this concept. Let's
look at the word first set amology. It's often said
to come from an Arabic root word meaning to hide,
and some interpretations take this a little bit further to
mean beings who are concealed from the senses. Uh Jin
(08:43):
is the plural. The singular would be genie j i
n i, and that's where genie comes from. But uh
it when it was anglicized in some places, people took
it to mean a guardian of a specific place. And
while these are popular theories there, there are also competing
(09:06):
theories or interpretations, one saying that one saying that Genie
or the concept originally came from what we're seen as
demons or evil spirits in early Christian or Judeo Christian beliefs.
But unlike some other supernatural beings, uh Jin are actually
(09:30):
mentioned in the Koran. They have an origin story right um.
In the Koran, God actually makes three sapient forms of life, angels,
gen and humans. Men were made of clay, angels from light,
and Jin are described as being made of a smokeless
scorching fire, which is sort of Sinister's tunding if you
(09:53):
ask me crazy stuff. Like humans, Jin have free will,
some are Muslim and some are not hunt and like humans,
Jin being capable of good and bad, will be judged
by God on the Day of Judgment and sent to
Hell or to Paradise as their actions accord. But here's
the thing. Although Jin are mentioned in the Koran, they
(10:16):
were believed in before the before Islam they were They
were pre Islamic originally, and in some cases there's some
evidence that they were maybe gods or at least spirits
that were paid tribute to uh In. In Palmira, for example, Yeah,
there's this Aramaic inscription at a place called beth Fasil
(10:40):
which pays tribute to the genie spelled g I n
in a y e as the good and rewarding gods.
So until about the fourth century as we rate time today, Uh,
many of the populations that were in the Middle East
practice a different polytheistic religions. There were there were significant
(11:04):
Jewish and later Christian minorities that developed, but Polytheism remained
the dominant belief system in pre Islamic Arabia and Jin,
which started in some cases being worshiped as gods, are
thought to have later been downgraded to lesser status as
spirits as demons, especially after the religious waves of monotheism. Yeah,
(11:28):
I can see that you demonize the gods that came prior.
I understand that. Well, there's religious syncretism to write. Uh,
the idea that the idea that when a religion is
growing or spreading, it says, well, these other things that
exist do exist, and we're not. What what we're doing
is we're showing you why they exist. They're also part
(11:51):
of this belief system, which is the one true belief system.
Is typically how a lot of religions handle it. So
where do Jin hang out? A lot of times they're
in dark places. That maybe why when the west owners
came along to create stories out of this, they put
him in a lamp that's really dark, or in a
you know, a ring, or in a cave or something
(12:12):
like that, lost as well, like sort of like they're
buried like like you know, U totally shut away, as
if they were not ever meant to be discovered again
kind of thing. Yes, and again because they're supposed to
be isolated, right right, And if we could talk just
a little bit about the idea of where the artifact
belief comes in. Solomon was King Solomon's thought to command
(12:35):
spirits that were a type of jin through the use
of a ring, right, the Ring of Solomon, which I
think also still shows up in pop culture. Right, yeah, Oh,
the that ring is everywhere. I I would say, and
I don't know if this is true because I haven't
looked too much into it, but the one ring to
rule them all, I think that might have like have
(12:55):
some kickbacks Mr Solomon. And then also the also we
should mention the Grimoires or the books of magic known
as the Key of Solomon or the lesser Keys of Solomon,
also thought to contain rituals which, when performed properly, allow
one to communicate with and or control these spirits. Uh,
(13:18):
Matt Nolan, I have not attempted to do this as
far as I know, speak for yourself, sir, Okay, okay,
Matt and Noel have attempted to do this. I don't
want to put you guys on glass and ask too
much about how how it worked out. That that doesn't
change one way or the other. So the the idea here,
(13:43):
which I thought was fascinating, and I'm speculating here. I
wanted to ask you listeners because I couldn't find any
solid proof of this. But we're there jin cults like
what other than you know, other than being a statue
or shrine one would pay trip be two where they're
actually religious systems that were large built on worshiping maybe
(14:06):
one or two creatures or gods that would later become gin.
I don't know, but it's interesting. Well yeah, and it
wouldn't have to be it wouldn't have to be that
large to be a cult of a certain gin, especially
if it was worshiped, you know, for hundreds and hundreds
of years for a while there as a god. Then
everything broke off as the new religions came through, and
(14:26):
then they you know, maybe an isolated group somewhere. I
can totally imagine that I can also see like maybe
there's like a rogue gin, you know, who wants to
like become more like a god and then command his
own followers. I could just see that in terms of
like folklore. Oh yeah, that happens, and we'll get to
it just a second. I think we'll really appreciate this part.
(14:46):
Before we get to that, let's talk about the different
types of gin, because not all are created equal. Some
have specialties, some are automatically evil, some could go either way.
But as we go into this, do you want to
abolished that? The folklore gets kind of sticky because there
are creatures or beings in other and other regions or
(15:08):
and sometimes even in other belief systems that are considered gin.
And then there there are arguments that people will have
over whether that whether one type of creature should be
considered a subclass of gin or its own thing. Well,
that being said, jen are smart, have social organizations, uh
(15:30):
in their community. They have kings, they have laws of marriages,
they have births, you know, all the normal days of
our lives stuff. They just but while humans cannot perceive gen,
apparently they can perceive the human world. So this it's
(15:50):
an interesting idea because it means that there is an
invisible world occurring all around us, and we are in
some sort of glass house of existence or some sort
of one way mirror. Yeah, there there are a few
planes of existence up than we are, and somehow they
can see down, but the mirror only goes one way.
That's cool. So one common belief in Muslim lord list. Again,
(16:16):
this list is not This list is not universally accepted.
But let's let's look at the various types of jenn.
The first would be uh the mariad or married m
A R I D. And I do apologize for pronunciation
of Arabic here uh. In Lane's Arabic English lexicon, these
(16:41):
types of jin are said to be the strongest, the
ones of great power uh in in the in the
Lanes lexicon. They're actually said to be evil, but this
isn't universally agreed on. These are the ones we think.
I only think of the genie in Aladdin, the ability
to do all these powerful things, even unto granting wishes,
(17:03):
if you flatter them enough, if they like you, if
you do something for them. Uh. And that's so, that's
what people in the West generally think about. But that's
not all of the gin in the world. Now you
also have an affret and this is one that I
have heard of before. You may have heard of this
(17:24):
as well. It's often described as this enormous winged creature
of fire. Think of phoenix almost in my head, and
that's what I'm seeing. Can be either sex, male or female.
It lives ground, underground, and a lot of times it
will it will fly around ruins of someplace where tragedy
(17:44):
has occurred or war has been fought, or you know,
where something has where something has occurred where perhaps there
was death. And then we get to it's called the
shad or the shy time U s h i t
a n s h a y t a. And this
this goes exactly to what you were talking about. And also, uh,
(18:06):
the concept is like this that during the creation of
the world, there is one jin that refuses to bow
to God and its name is Iblis. Sounds familiar, sounds
a little like, Oh, I don't know, was that the church,
(18:26):
lady Revercott, I don't know, was it. So this is
that this would be considered the devil in the Qoran,
and the devil had followers Jin who decided to side
with iblis uh. And it's it's interesting because while there
are parallels, they are you know, there are differences as well.
(18:50):
The primary thing here is that these creatures which sometimes
are not considered jin but simply demons. Depending upon which
scholar you're talking to or which book you're basing it on,
is it based on the Koran? Is it based on
earlier like folklore, right, academic studies, So there are going
to be differences in interpretation here, but the main thing
(19:11):
that always stays the same is that these are the
bad guys nice, they're not cool? Uh? And then speaking yeah,
speaking of not cool, there's something else the google. So
I guess that's where that word comes from. Yes, yeah,
just so. Yeah. Nowadays we think of gooules as the
(19:33):
um as similar to a vampire, right, these undead creatures
usually that eat flesh rather than drink blood for sustenance.
And goblins is what I see. I see two d
little pixelated things. They tend to travel by shambling, yes,
the primary form of locomotion. I actually think. I play
(19:54):
the Fallout series a lot and really enjoy those. And
there is a whole um you know, group of arcters
called ghouls and they've basically been irradiated to the point
where there they look like you know, zombies, but they
don't necessarily eat flesh unless they've kind of passed a
threshold and then they get to a point where they
will be exactly they're called feral ghouls. Exactly do they
(20:15):
have do they have any profound abilities or they just
rotting people? Um? It depends. Like there are some that
are so irradiated that they can actually shoot like radiation
energy a you and like vomit like you know, radiate
radioactive goo. Um. But you know, some of the ones
that are that are still more or less human, they
you know, run taverns things like that. You know, so
(20:37):
that the ghouls that we're talking about are a little different,
I know, but I love those guls. There are several
that you interact with in the third one that make
you very happy. Uh. But these these a lot of
times will inhabit a graveyard, right. There are other places
that just there's no humans. And this type of jen
(20:57):
has been said to be sired by it bliss, so
not siding with this uh, diabolical character against God, but
to have been created by this diabolical character. And then
there is the gen j a n n uh thought
of as the weakest type of jin. So a few
(21:19):
traditions divide gin into three classes, those who have wings
and fly in the air, those who resemble snakes and dogs,
and those who simply travel ceaselessly. But they've also been
described as creatures of different forms vultures, snakes, others like humanoid.
They might even be dragons or a number of other animals.
(21:39):
And and it said that some of these can shape
shift right, right, So that would maybe another reason why
we have so many different depictions of animals, and very
widely varying animals. And let's talk about gin and magic.
Did did you think I was gonna say, jen and juice?
I was really hoping. I was hoping I would to
(22:01):
hope springs eternal. I guess that will be for afterwork, right. Uh.
In folklore, of course, these beings are often associated with magic,
its concept that exists in the modern day still as
the old rub a magic lamp, get some wishes bits.
And we mentioned that, uh, certain historical humans like King
Solomon were said to control jin, and in some ways
(22:26):
acts of magic entirely have been described as a magician
entering into some sort of contract with one or more
of these beings of Gin and worshiping them, or I
guess paying some sort of obeesience in order to receive information.
That's one of the big ones about unknown things, so
(22:49):
Claire sentience, clairvoyance, or to receive riches power. Well, you know,
the whole standard, the usual, the usual, uh, supervillain starter package.
And you've got some lines from the Koran here I
had mentioned Iblis, right, we mentioned Iblis, who would be
Satan in in this story, Satan didn't follow or Iblis
(23:12):
didn't follow God's command to prostrate himself unto man. So
he still he still wouldn't play ball, but he said,
I'm not the one to prostrate myself to a human being,
because you know, you made him out of clay. And
then to which point God said get out. And the
(23:33):
existence of jin, as mentioned in the Koran, matters immensely,
maybe more so than you might think, because for many
people they would say, well, Matt Noel Ben, this is interesting,
but this is folklore. Why are you talking about it?
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. Here's
(24:03):
where it gets crazy. You see, belief in jin is
not something restricted two thousands of years ago. It is
not something that exists distant chronologically. There is a modern
belief in Jin. There are like people across the world
(24:24):
believe that Jin are real, yeah, and they want to
prove that it's real through science. Right. Though not all
Muslims believe in Jin, many do and some universities published
research and hold workshops seeking to prove the existence of
Jin and argue how they exist in the modern world
or how science can help humanity understand the nature of
(24:47):
these beings. So an example would be from Jin Invade
Campus by Purvis Hood boy Um a workshop quote. A
workshop title Jin's and Black Magic was organized in Islamabad
by the Department of Humanities at the Compstats Institute of Technology,
which is the s c I i T, one of
Pakistan's largest universities. The invited speaker, Razab xil Hawk, introduced
(25:09):
as a spiritual cardiologist, is reputedly an expert on demonic
possessions and evil spirits. So this is an elite university
in Pakistan. So this this is an active area of studying. Right.
It's it's very important to say, for instance, unlike um,
(25:31):
unlike what what would another thing be? Fairies or you know, uh,
imagine inserts supernatural being here. Uh, it's it's not as uh,
it's not as derided as those kinds of beliefs. Or
it's kind of like an an angels expert came to
speak at Harvard or something as imagining. Yeah, that's not
(25:51):
a bad comparison, you know, or at M I T
or something. So while proposing theories about the nature of JEN,
these researchers and academics have at times have a time said, well,
science can help us understand these we're there, you'll see
references to maybe microorganisms or parallel universes or forms of
(26:12):
imperceivable energy and higher frequencies. At this point, the concept
of GIN is not scientifically accepted in the West or
many non Muslim parts of the world. And again we
want to emphasize we're not painting with a broad brush here.
We're saying nothing about all people of a specific religion,
where what we are establishing instead is that people in
(26:34):
the modern world today, as you listen to this, believe
that jin exists. And that's not just that they don't
just exist as some sort of passive, watchful entities, right
that you can maybe get some wishes out of if
you have the right ring or the right lamp, they
have agency, they have the ability to do things in
(26:54):
the human world to humans. And this is kind of
the disturbing part. No, man, if you like, there's plenty
of Christians that would say the same thing about angels,
I think that's an excellent point. Yeah, no, absolutely, But
the creepy thing here is what if these things do
exist and they can possess humans to cause humans to
(27:15):
do things that they normally wouldn't, perhaps to influence something politically,
a movement or something like that. I that's one of
the beliefs, right right, Yeah, there's this belief that jin
are able to possess human beings. And this this is
a weird thing. So you can go right now on
(27:36):
YouTube and see footage of what what are said to
be exorcisms. And we we talked about this a little
bit in a previous episode when we cover the differences
between exorcisms around the world. You know, like the the
Catholic Church has a very specific right and and uh
and in Islam there are specific rights as well. You
(28:01):
can also find people who are you know, who are
describing the signs of possession by a jin or the
signs of someone trafficking and magic the sign that you
have encountered somehow a jin, and the possession is typically
exorcised through uh the recitation of the Koran, seeking refuge, remembrance,
(28:24):
and supplicators uh as. It's also a way that other
sicknesses or problems might be addressed. And I really like
people to check out our our previous episode on exorcism
because we had an interesting conversation that I guess we
won't get into too much here, but I want to
know what you folks think is possession real in your experience,
(28:49):
because we know that historically signs of mental illness were
mistaken for possession. We know that signs of grief or
maybe psychotic breaks or maybe even mental disabilities all mistaken
for possession at some point in the past, which is
a horrific thing. But according to people who believe this,
Jim Jin possession is something that experts can clearly discern
(29:14):
and through the use of these techniques drive drive the
jin out, and unlike demons possessing people in Catholic or
Christian belief systems, jin are not necessarily evil. Yeah, that's
a huge difference. They have free will, so I was
looking at in the course of research, I was looking at, uh,
(29:37):
some some scholars, some Islamic scholars, talking about Jin possession,
and one of the big reasons for possession, according to
some of these sources was love, like a jin being
in love with a human, with the human that they're possessing,
or with another human that they're possessing a to get
(29:59):
to be either way. What if we take it back
a step to our early description of kind of the
preconceived ideas of a genie or a gin, and as
we've gotten to where we are now in the podcast,
I think we've sort of taking that apart a little bit.
And I'm just wondering, is that do you consider that
(30:19):
version those points we made about you know, being chained
to a an artifact of sub sort and you know,
granting wishes and things like that and ultimately being a
force for kind of chaos based on what happens when
those wishes are granted. Is all that just from kind
of like whitewashed like re tellings of you know, folk
stories and made to be more palatable for a wider audience,
(30:42):
sort of like in the same way that you know,
grim fairy tales were much much nastier, and then they're
sort of retooled. You know, that's a really interesting question.
What do you think, man, I would say, that's exactly
what's happened, because we've got one specific type of gin
that are being described by most of the pular culture
that the ma read. I don't know how to say
(31:03):
it correctly. I think it's the mariad uh. And you know,
so you've got that one particular story and then you
kind of expand out and say, well, this is what
all genies are like when you look at it through
the lens. I think that's what's happening. Yeah, I can
see the religious syncretism occurring there as well. And it's
also important for us to note that modern belief in
(31:26):
jin is not necessarily unique in in that um. Just
in the process of this sort of belief. For instance,
there are other persistent beliefs in things that you know,
the rest of the world will call supernatural rather than factual.
Ghost of ancestors are still commonly venerated in religions around
the world, and then invisible elves in Iceland. You guys
(31:50):
heard about that, right, They they're real, guys. I think
they're real. The who do folk uh these elves in
Icelandic folklore. The belief is so commonplace, or purportedly so commonplace,
that it affects modern construction. Also, I one thing that
(32:12):
fascinates me is when when people look at beliefs in spirits,
and you know, there are some people who can put
up a very strong argument that jin are not spirits
so much as they are another type of living thinking being.
(32:33):
You know, because they do live, they're not undead. So
this stuff astonishes and amazes me, both the growth of
the folklore to the modern day beliefs. And I know
for certain that it is easy for some people to
feel maybe condescending in some way and say, oh, look
(32:57):
at this outdated belief And I live in the modern age.
And because I live in the modern age, I know
better than these people who believe differently For me, but
especially if you live in the developed world, I would
ask you, uh to examine some of the common beliefs
we have. Future historians are going to think that we
(33:18):
were so foolish when we explained the following situation. Yes,
back in the day, we used to hop into these
machines the way thousands and thousands of pounds and we're
we're powered by explosions internally. And we would drive within
feet of each other because we called it driving, and
they would say, well, hey, wait, how did you do
it safely? And we said, well, we had this honor system.
(33:40):
You see. We painted lines on places where we would
drive and we just said we wouldn't hit each other.
And would say, oh, but so is that how you
avoided accidents and would say no, no, accidents happened constantly, constantly.
We we just we believed we were safer but got hurt, right, right,
So I wouldn't. What I'm saying is that it is
(34:02):
an error for anyone me, Noel, Matt you perhaps listener
to assume that we have the conclusive and final answer
on what we believe in the worth of what we believe, right,
(34:22):
So I would say, we have to be very careful
not to cast dispersions or stones. You know, if I'm
in Iceland and somebody tells me not to mess with
the rock because something lives there. Yeah, whether or not
I personally believe, I'm not gonna launch into some lecture
you know, about the nature of geology. Uh, And this
(34:44):
this is where we leave it. We are a world
filled to the brim with people. There are billions of
us and amongst those billions, depending on who you believe
and what you're reading, there exists billions more unseen things
(35:04):
that in terms of philosophy and mental ability, quite similar
to us. So just like our earlier, earlier work on
coded languages, you know, again there's this invisible world and
more and more I think about it, we're running into
these concepts of invisible worlds. We talked about train hoppers
(35:26):
and some things as serial killer cults, when we talked
about jin So that's that's really what I see us
going into. More and more are these ideas of hidden
worlds and this concept of what we can and cannot prove.
But I have a question, uh for you guys listeners,
do you have any in your neck of the woods.
(35:47):
Do you have any um popular folklore beliefs in unseen
or supernatural beings? And if so, do you believe the stories? Why?
Could you tell us some pacifics? Yeah? Do you have
any anecdotes where you maybe have had an encounter? I
don't want to hear those, yeah, that you could or
could not explain. And I'd like to close on a
(36:10):
question for you guys, if if we each had a
wish and it would and you couldn't wish for more wishes,
what would your wish be? Oh man, this is tough.
I think I would probably. I mean there's two there.
You can split it down the middle. You can go
for like a very self serving wish, or you could
(36:31):
go for a wish that helps others. But then you
get into that situation where it's all about the language.
It's all about the wording of the wish, really careful,
you know, because you might say I want world peace
and it means that everyone dies, right. Or you might
say you might say I want to live forever, and
you do, but you still age and everywhere, trap somewhere,
and all your loved ones die around you. Um, I
(36:53):
guess I would just I would wish I would do
some of some very carefully worded version of just you know,
just wanting to never you know, like be able to
always make sure I can take care of my family
and myself and just have maybe not absurd wealth, but
(37:15):
just be comfortable all the time and never have to
worry about paying bills and anything of that nature. Just
have some sort of like maybe maybe it's a magic
platinum card that you can just pay for everything with
and you never get a bill, you know, something like that.
I know that's very selfish and boring, but I just
feel like the world case one would you know, could
(37:35):
potentially be disastrous. I would ask for a single, let's say,
a single tomato plant that always has tomatoes on it. Always,
no matter how many tories you take from the plant,
there's always more tomatoes. It's like you gets sick of tomatoes.
I don't care, man, and I will never and yeah
(38:00):
this caveat at the end, I will never never get
sick of I can always sell the tomatoes, saying have
you been going through some tomato related shenanigans? Man? Are
you okay? I was trying to imagine something that would
be super manageable, that would be small. I was trying
to think of ways that it could hurt me. Don't
think you have to tomatoes? And you you didn't mention
(38:21):
the size of the planet, so what if it's so huge?
It's okay. We we don't have a gen in the room.
What about you, Ben? I have no idea, and I'm
not sure I want to reveal that much about my personality,
but I would Okay, I would probably wish for in
(38:43):
a very carefully worded way, as Noel said, I would
wish for uh, some series of superpowers and try to
sneak them all in as like the same thing. My
one wish would be a run on sentence obviously, just
a c y A right, And then I would try
to use those powers to make the world a better place,
(39:04):
because it's all about the journey, isn't it. And uh,
And I also think I'm also concerned, just in this
fictional world of granted wishes, I also wonder if there's
some higher chance or likelihood of things going wrong if
the wish affects more people. So maybe if you just
wish for something for yourself and then use that to
(39:25):
affect a larger change, it's safer, It's really good. Ben
Even something like invisibility, Let's think about how often that
comes into play as being the ultimate power to get
things done, you know what I mean. So you could
certainly affect some change with invisibility. You could sneak into
so many places in Bermuda in Singapore, and you could
do the next Panama papers. I would well, you know
(39:47):
that's the thing. Would you be invisible to the human eye,
in visible to everything? Could you wear clothes because I
don't want to try to see you want to be
invisible at will to all? You just fall through the
map listeners that listeners. Uh you know, Matt and I
wish you guys could see the way that Nole's eyes
(40:09):
lit up when they said through all that was great.
Uh yeah, I would go for invulnerability teleportation. I would
say psionic powers, just so I could get all of them.
Just say all the X Men. That's all you have
to say. Oh no, man, there's some X Men. You
weren't that great, but that that gen is gonna call
Shenanigans on that wish though, dude, Like I mean, it's
(40:31):
like the man, come on, yeah, they've seen it all.
They can't. You can't do that. They pick one be
an immortal and then they would plush you with their
giant thumb. Yeah, or maybe it'll short circuit. It'll say,
you know, I've had a hard week. Been the best
thing you do is a cheese steak, And I'll say, thanks, dude,
cool man, I appreciate it. Never ending cheese steak. When
(40:55):
never ending cheese steak, Oh dude, that's crazy. You could
feed the world with one. She's steak that never ends.
I think, you know, I think we're optimistic here and
we're thinking of we're thinking of the best possible outcomes.
But I'm gonna spend some time, Uh, I'm gonna spend
(41:16):
some time pondering what a decent wish would be and
how you would write it. We hope that you enjoyed
this episode. Ladies and gentlemen. What kind of stuff would
you wish for? And please do remember to tell us
about what kind of things are beings you've heard about
in your neck of the global woods. We want to
hear from you. And speaking of hearing from you, it's
(41:38):
time for shut ut corners. Yes, that's right, shout out
corner the moment in every show where we shout out
listeners who request said shout out um. First today we
have one for East Bay, newt A k A muti
uh he or she is interested hearing more about Planet nine,
(42:02):
and I fear I can't help with that, can you?
What's what's those? It's the proposed ninth planet that we
found in the Solar System that's out over there by Pluto,
way out there. I missed that one, guys. I want
to know more too. It hasn't been confirmed yet, but
it's we're pretty sure there's something there from from the
(42:23):
the way the other planets move. Well, let's dig into it.
That's an excellent suggestion, Thank you, NUTI. Our next shout
out is from Justin for this quote, specifically, the best
way to find a needle in a haystack is to
set the hay on fire. This goes back to our
earlier conversation about the Panama papers. And you can find Justin.
(42:44):
He is at math math anug and that's m A
T h A in U g G if you want
to follow him. And here more interesting quotes if I
remember correctly, though, I think the analogy we used was
a needle and a pile of needles, but unfortunately needles
are not flammable. In that case, it was needles on needles.
And finally today shout out to Debbie's utant. I think
(43:07):
I'm saying that correctly. She wrote to us on Facebook.
She said very nice things, and she also said, if
we are ever in the Florida Keys, gentlemen, we are
invited out to her bar where she bartends, and she
will she said, we will have an extra special time,
I guess because she would get us drunk. Game on.
(43:27):
All right, Well, that's all from us for to day.
Ladies and gentlemen. Please check out our video on jin Uh.
Please also stay tuned to hear what topics recovery next.
We do a live show about once a week and
you can ask us anything. Typically we're over on Facebook now, right, guys,
that's correct. We're hanging out on Facebook all the time.
(43:48):
We're gonna be throwing some more videos up there very soon.
Oh what is the date right now? Guys? Two more days.
We have a very special classic episode that we're gonna
put up on Facebook very soon and you'll know why.
And in the meantime, if you have any ideas for
upcoming topics we should cover, we would love to hear
from you. Take a page out of Nudie, Justin and
(44:10):
Debbie's book and drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter,
or don't like the social media rigormar role and you've
got a longer story to tell us, We love to
hear that as well. You can email us directly. We
are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com.
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