I Dream of Genie, or postscript to the Arabian Nights: The tale of the Astronaut and the Djinn

I Dream of Genie
Or
A postscript to the Arabian Nights: The tale of the Astronaut and the Djinn

Paul Knight

“I am numb, With the lonely lust of devildom, Thrust the sword through the galling fetter, All devourer; all begetter” – Aleister Crowley, Hymn to Pan, 1913

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” -Robert J Oppenheimer, 16th July 1945

“Yes we had stopped the wartime killing, but we had killed a lot of people with our bombs, and worst of all we had let the genie out of the bottle, and now nuclear war would be a spectre for the world to face.” -Lawrence H Johnston, on the Manhattan Project

“In this late, this very late hour, it is with solutions that we must be primarily concerned. I seem to be living in a nation which does not know what freedom is.” –John Whiteside Parsons, Freedom is a Two Edged Sword, 1946

“And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear, you shout and no one seems to hear. And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.” –Pink Floyd, Brain Damage, 1973

“Arabian nights, ‘neath Arabian moons; a fool off his guard could fall and fall hard, out there on the dunes”- Alan Irwin Menken and Howard Ashman, lyric from Arabian Nights from Disney’s Aladdin, 1992

It’s nearing Panto season again, so I thought it might be fun to take a look at the story of Aladdin, and some other stories involving Genies, to a greater or lesser extent. Word association; if I said the word Genie to you, what would you think of? Chances are the first image in your mind would be the character voiced by the late Robin Williams in the Disney version of Aladdin- a wise-cracking, blue fellow in harem pants.

You might also think of the Arabian Nights, the source from which the Aladdin story first made its way into western cultural consciousness, eventually becoming retold in Christmas pantomime and as that animated Disney classic. In fact, The Tale of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp was not part of the original Arabic collection of stories- but was added to the canon by European translators.

You would almost certainly associate the Genie archetype with some kind of narrative involving the granting of wishes. As it is often the case in folklore and fairytales, you would probably be aware that wishes granted by mysterious supernatural agents have a way of backfiring on the wisher.

Of course, it all depends on what you wish for. Generally, in folklore, the wishes for untold riches and political power are the ones which end up causing all the trouble. Better to wish for something for the benefit of everybody, and hope they appreciate it and treat you right. It’s a gamble, but you could do pretty well for dinner invites if you made the wish to provide everybody with unlimited, free, clean power for example. Might work out better in the end, but it’s your wish, and you must wish for what you want. If that turns out to be a swanky crown or mastery over the rest of the human race, don’t forget we had this chat.

Anyway, I could be completely wrong about the clean, free power thing. You might find it wasn’t worth the bother when the guys from the petro-chemical industry turn up to put the thumb screws on you. I don’t know.

It all depends on who you talk to about Genies, anyway. There are a lot of people who would tell you to keep well away. Indeed, belief in Genies or Djinn or Jinn, is an accepted part of Islam. Muslims believe in the existence of Genies as part of the God given order of things which also includes Angels and Humans. Christians and Muslims share a common belief in the existence of Angels, of course, but only in Islam do we find a scriptural basis for belief in Djinn.

In Christianity and Islam, angels are thought of as messengers of God, relaying various messages and punishments from God throughout the scriptures. In Christianity, angels are often portrayed as winged beings who give off a nimbus of light. In Islam, the teaching is that in the beginning, God made angels from the light itself, and humans from clay. Christianity teaches something very similar; the first man is created from the clay.

However, the order of creation in Islam includes another complete category of beings- the Djinn, who God made from smokeless fire. Djinn, in Islam, are much like humans in that they share the same free will we enjoy. Islam teaches that some Djinn are good and some bad, some are neutral and indifferent. Some Djinn are Christian, some are Muslim, some are non-believers. There are Buddhist Djinn and Hindu; rationalist Djinn, Djinn alchemists, Djinn nihilists.

In fact, Islam teaches that Djinn have a whole society- a tribal identity and hierarchy, with Djinn of various castes and roles. Djinn might help a human being they encounter, or they might hinder them for fun; they might take a dislike to the human in question and decide to destroy their life in some horrible way. You just never know with them.

Consequently, Djinn, in Islam, are treated with respect. The Islamic equivalent of the Christian Satan is a Djinn, Eblis, the greatest and most powerful of them, who refused God’s order to bow to mankind, and was banished from God’s sight with his group of rebels.

These rebels are the evil Djinn; the ones who are bad luck- the ones who possess the bodies of humans and cause hauntings; the ones who lurk in ruins and dark holes, full of malevolence. They would seem to be very far removed from Disney- of course, this area is full of inconsistencies, and we may find that they are not so far removed as we might have imagined.

Islamic teachings are very clear on the subject of Djinn- particularly with relation to how they were created, and what from; the language is very specific- smokeless fire.

Sometime during the Crusades, garbled versions of the Muslim stories of Djinn made their way into Europe- into the folklore and religious belief of the time, becoming the fiery devils of the medieval vision of hell, and somewhere along the line, they lost the detail of specifically representing not just fire, but smokeless fire; it can’t have seemed important, but it was.

What is smokeless fire then? What differentiates it from normal fire? To tell that story, we have to go back to the end of the Second World War, to the Manhattan Project, which built the first nuclear weapons the world had ever seen.

On the 19th of July 1945, the team behind the Trinity test bomb stood at a safe distance and observed the first atomic mushroom cloud. The story goes that some laughed, some cried, and some stood in silence. The experience of watching what he had unleashed on the world caused Jewish physicist Robert Oppenheimer to be moved to mutter the now famous phrase from the Bhagavad Gita referring to Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer, the opening of whose eye gives birth to the universe, and annihilates it upon closure.

Shiva, another blue fellow, is often depicted as the Lord of the Dance, a symbol which has been described by Aldous Huxley as “the Shiva with four arms, dancing with one foot raised...the figure stands within a great circle, a sort of halo, which has symbols of flames around it. This is the circle of mass, energy, space and time, and this is the material world... within this Shiva dances... he is everywhere in the universe, this is his dance, and the manifestation of the world is called his “play”...he’s beyond good and evil of course, the whole thing is just an immense manifestation of play... in the upper right hand he holds a drum, which summons things into creation... in his upper left arm he holds a fire, which is what destroys everything; he both creates and destroys”.

Although an influential figure in early space science, Parsons has been almost completely whitewashed from history. The science establishment is very uncomfortable with one central aspect of Parson’s personality and life- Jack was an occultist, a ritual magician, a high ranking member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the magical society headed by English occultist Aleister Crowley- a man famously described in the conservative British press as “the wickedest man in the world”.

Parsons was well known for intoning Crowley’s Hymn to Pan before rocket tests, which struck some of the other scientists as at the very least eccentric. Crowley, although rumoured to have worked for both British and German intelligence services, would appear to have stood in opposition to the forces of Nazi fascism, or at least, that the Axis powers had as ambiguous a relationship with him as did the Allies. Although vilified by the British, Crowley was also expelled from Italy where he had set up a cult compound, the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, by none other than Benito Mussolini. A statue of the Dancing Shiva can be found outside the Cern laboratory in Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider- a gift from Indian physicists, which has been interpreted in various different ways by commentators.

On that same day in 1945, watching the first mushroom cloud rise into the desert sky, another member of Oppenheimer’s team, physicist Lawrence H Johnston, would make another comment comparing the bomb to a figure from mythology.

Johnston compared the Trinity bomb to letting “the Genie out of the bottle”, so we can see that from the very first instance humans saw it, there was an association of the Genie, the Islamic mythological being said to be created from smokeless fire, with a nuclear blast. Some kind of half forgotten piece of mythological symbolism which somehow found a real life referent a thousand years after the association was first made.

The next part of the story takes us into a very murky period of history- the period immediately following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war, when the looting of the Third Reich began. Each of the formerly Allied powers began to race into the ruins of the former Reich, in search of German technology and German scientific personnel. Everybody was trying to beat the others to the prize, sending Special Forces groups to secure as much former Nazi technology as possible; their story, I might go into another time.

Interestingly, as a minor aside, the British commando group sent to secure as much of the German technology as possible was headed by none other than Ian Fleming, writer the Bond novels, who was at that time in working in British Naval Intelligence. We might look at Bond’s famous gadgets in a new light from now on.

This aside for now, it is enough to know that the race was on, and the former allied powers were plunged into competition for control of German resources. One of these efforts, the American Project Paperclip, has a particular bearing on our story.

Paperclip was the attempt by the American military to repatriate former Nazi scientists to work for the US. Many former Nazis, including a number of notorious war criminals, were secretly smuggled into the USA, and given jobs in various US corporations and military research.

The American military was particularly interested in rocketry, and managed to get to many key German personnel before anyone else did. These individuals were put to work in the fledgling American space program- at that time, still a military project. NASA, the civilian US space program would not be founded for a few more years. Rocketry was still very much in its infancy.

At this point, it’s worth taking some time to talk about one of the most controversial personalities of the pre-Paperclip US military rocketry operations, John Whiteside Parsons. Jack to his friends, Parsons was an early pioneer of the US Space Program whose quote from the top of this article, from an essay he wrote in 1946 seems especially relevant today. This is no surprise- Parsons was well ahead of his time.

Jack was young, handsome and brilliant- one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, it was Parsons who solved many of the problems associated with the creation of the first solid rocket fuel. He has a crater named after him on the dark side of the moon.

Although an influential figure in early space science, Parsons has been almost completely whitewashed from history. The science establishment is very uncomfortable with one central aspect of Parson’s personality and life- Jack was an occultist, a ritual magician, a high ranking member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the magical society headed by English occultist Aleister Crowley- a man famously described in the conservative British press as “the wickedest man in the world”.

Parsons was well known for intoning Crowley’s Hymn to Pan before rocket tests, which struck some of the other scientists as at the very least eccentric. Crowley, although rumoured to have worked for both British and German intelligence services, would appear to have stood in opposition to the forces of Nazi fascism, or at least, that the Axis powers had as ambiguous a relationship with him as did the Allies. Although vilified by the British, Crowley was also expelled from Italy where he had set up a cult compound, the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, by none other than Benito Mussolini.

Parsons would attract other eccentrics and odd characters to himself, notably striking up a friendship with another shadowy figure, science fiction writer and alleged former US Naval Intelligence operative L. Ron. Hubbard, who would go on to found another new religious cult, Scientology.

The story goes that Hubbard was fascinated by the maverick Parsons, and the two would design and perform a series of magickal rituals together on the future site of the Palomar observatory in San Diego County, California.

They called the rituals they performed together the Babalon Working, after the Crowleyan, Thelemic goddess, though what the rituals consisted of exactly, and what they were designed to achieve, remains a contested subject. For the purposes of our story, it is enough to know that Parsons and Hubbard performed a series of sex-magick rituals together, before Hubbard was ever a Scientologist.

The folklore surrounding Parsons and Hubbard goes on to state that Hubbard then apparently stole Parson’s money in a crooked business deal, stole his girlfriend, bought a yacht, and sailed off to found Scientology. Some critics claim that Hubbard pieced his religion together from half-understood, half remembered scraps of what he heard from Parsons. It would seem that a semi-secret conflict between Thelemites and Scientologists has been raging ever since.

In particular, the mythology created by Hubbard for Scientology would centre on the story of Xenu, the dictator of a “Galactic Confederacy” who brought millions of his followers to earth in the distant past, imprisoned them in volcanoes and killed them with hydrogen bombs.

According to the official tenets of Scientology, the spirits of these murdered beings, known as Thetans, are still active in the world, attaching themselves to human beings and causing various types of spiritual harm to their parasitised host. The aim of Scientology is to help the parasitised human host to rid itself of these creatures, a state of being known as “going clear”.

There is an element of Parsons story which seems particularly relevant to our tale- his romantic and magickal association with artist, occultist and well known figure of the 1960’s subculture of Los Angeles, Marjorie Cameron.

The story of how the two met is bizarre in an extreme. Parsons, looking for a woman who embodied the Babalon figure from Crowley’s religion Thelema for the purposes of his sex-magic rituals, apparently performed a ceremony designed to attract to him a female fire elemental in human form.

Parsons was looking for a human manifestation of a Succubus, or perhaps a Djinn. In Islam, Djinn are admitted to be able to form romantic attachments to humans, though these inter-species relationships are thought to lead to tragic results for both human and Djinn- similar to the Western folklore surrounding relationships between humans and fairies.

Shortly after performing the ritual, Parsons would come to meet Cameron, whose witchy presence and red hair marked her out to Parsons as the manifestation and result of his ritual. They were married in 1946; the same year Parsons wrote his essay Freedom is a Two Edged Sword, for the Ordo Templi Orientis, who would publish it following his death. Cameron would help to edit the published text.

Although initially unsure, Cameron would come to believe that she was exactly what Parsons claimed she was. Following his untimely death in 1952, she would come to inhabit the role Parsons marked out for her for the rest of her life; a human manifestation of being of elemental fire, not unlike the Islamic understanding of the Djinn.

Cameron, whose eerie, uncanny art has something of Aubrey Beardsley about it and something of the same flavour as the work of British occult artist Austin Osman Spare, would be captured in person in a number of appearances on film. She would appear alongside Dennis Hopper in Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, playing a sea witch, and as the goddess Babalon in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

Curtis Harrington, probably best known for directing hit TV show Dynasty, would make a film of Cameron surrounded by her art, Wormwood Star. The title was a reference to the Biblical Book of Revelations, which contains the verse “a great star, burning like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water- the name of the star is Wormwood”.

Wormwood, the psychoactive ingredient in Absinthe, is also mentioned in the Old Testament several times, always in relation to bitterness. It is interesting to note that the same process of nuclear fission which takes place in a nuclear bomb, also takes place in the heart of a star. In all the history of the glittering Hollywood star system, only Cameron has ever been referred to as Wormwood.

Cameron was a central, yet elusive presence on the Los Angeles alternative scene; she shared accommodation at different times with both Dennis Hopper and Quantum Leap actor Dean Stockwell.

Interestingly, both Hopper and Stockwell would perform in David Lynch’s sinister masterpiece, Blue Velvet; a depiction of a dark and disturbing underbelly of American life. In the film, the surface of mid 20th century Americana is depicted as faked; a badly built set. In comparison, Lynch depicts the seedy underworld with a nightmarish clarity and detail. The result is a highly unnerving cinematic experience.

Lynch would explore this concept again and again in his work, sometimes set in Los Angeles and the underbelly of Hollywood, and sometimes set in small town America, where the rustic setting hides the same vices, addictions, perversions and suggestions of the occult as in the city.

Kenneth Anger, a clear influence on Lynch (who even went so far as to use Bobby Vinton’s cover of Blue Velvet in his eponymous film, apparently in homage to Anger, who used it in his Scorpio Rising), is another delver into the dark side of Tinsel Town, writing two volumes of his Hollywood Babylon, about the scandals of Hollywood’s golden age.

Anger would lay bare some of Hollywood’s darkest secrets and damaging gossip in his controversial books, including press clippings from his own collection and even crime scene photographs such as Fatty Arbuckle’s smashed hotel room, taken on the night on which he destroyed his career in the industry and killed a promising ingénue actress in a horrific sexual assault.

Anger has the dirt on all the most lurid stories of Hollywood excess and scandal. Perhaps significantly, he describes Walt Disney as a “dirty old man”. There is apparently a third volume of Hollywood Babylon which Anger refuses to publish for fear of legal action on the part of Scientologist Tom Cruise.

We may never know exactly what Anger has to say about Cruise, which seems a shame. A new manifestation in the PR war between the two occult factions would no doubt make for some interesting gossip. Although Anger’s books were titled Hollywood Babylon, Anger was well aware that the real Hollywood Babalon was none other than Cameron.

Jack Parsons was killed in an explosion at his home in 1952. Cameron believed he had been assassinated, although she never knew exactly who had been responsible. Of course, by 1952, Project Paperclip had brought hundreds, or even thousands of former Nazi scientists and war criminals into the US, in particular, into the rocketry projects and research also involving Parsons and JPL.

Parsons, a radical libertarian, was in a state of dismay in 1946, dismay born out of a longing for personal freedoms he could see being eroded even then. The introduction of ardent fascists into his working environment presumably would not have improved his outlook.

By the time NASA was founded in 1958, there were various prominent former Nazis on the staff. These included SS Major and V2 rocket engineer Werner Von Braun, whose expertise would eventually send men to the moon in the Apollo missions, former Luftwaffe pilot and physicist Heinz Haber, whose work in Special Aviation Medicine made him an asset to the Space program, and Special Aviation Medicine pioneer Hubertus Strughold.

The Special Aviation Medicine expertise of Haber and Strughold was honed in the Dachau concentration camp, with horrifying human experimentation- injecting prisoners with petrol; submerging them in ice baths to see how long they took to die. Von Braun used slave camp labour to build his V2 rockets- more people would die building the rockets than the rockets themselves would kill.

Strughold, following Paperclip, ended up firstly working in aviation medicine at Randolph Field in Texas, before going on to work directly for NASA, heading the Aerospace Medical Division in 1962.

There is some evidence to suggest that in his final speech as US president, Dwight Eisenhower, who never approved of Paperclip and was furious to find the project went ahead without his say so, was referring to the Nazi infiltration of the US establishment in his comments warning of the power of the “military industrial complex”. He was ignored, and the Nazis became ever more embedded in American cultural life.

This leads us to the most astonishing instance of the coming together of the nexus of Nazi Paperclip scientists, Genies, and the world of Americana in the form of the Disney Corporation. A little known and mostly forgotten film produced in the year before the founding of NASA, while the US space program was still in military hands, entitled Our Friend the Atom.

Before we get to a discussion of the film itself, it is worth noting the circumstances surrounding the public relations attempts to re-position nuclear technology from something we should be scared of, into something we should embrace. There was a great need after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to make the nuclear industry seem friendly.

Although the Genie was first released from the bottle at the Trinity test site, in a wish to create a weapon which could destroy worlds, it was rebranded as our friend by 1957- a source of clean energy which would make the world a better place for everyone. This incredible feat of perception management was achieved in part by content creators such as Walt Disney.

The myth of clean energy which the nuclear power industry and our governments have put to us is, I’m afraid, a lie- an act of propaganda brought about by the need to enrich Uranium to make nuclear weapons.

We see this, notably, in the history of British nuclear projects, particularly the story of the Windscale reactor- now known, after another re-branding attempt, as Sellafield.

Windscale was sold to the British people as the answer to our prayers for a cleaner, safer world. It would provide jobs and a source of clean power which did not rely on Middle Eastern oil producing states. While it would produce some power, this was never the real intention of the British government, who had decided it was essential that there should be a British nuclear bomb. The real purpose of building the Windscale reactor was to enrich Uranium.

The reaction would produce a lot of energy in the form of heat, which would boil water to turn turbines. In fact, the heat energy was nothing more than a by product. Another product of the nuclear industry would be tons of depleted Uranium, which nobody would be able to figure out a use for, until somebody decided to use it to make ammunition. The first depleted uranium shells were fired in the first Gulf War, in Iraq; Baghdad- the jewel of the golden age of Islamic culture which would give us the stories from the Arabian Nights, and the first Genies in western cultural consciousness.

Depleted uranium, like a bad Genie, destroys people’s lives. Radiation destroys lives by destroying DNA. When the heavy depleted uranium shells impact on armour or buildings, they do so with enough velocity to vaporise, becoming tiny radioactive specks of metallic dust.

That radioactive dust, once introduced into the environment, cannot be removed. It blows into the huge dust storms and becomes inhaled, causing birth defects and cancers. One of the main reasons why the current Middle Eastern refugees, against the wisdom of the far right, cannot just go home is because western forces have rendered their homes radioactive. The use of DU ammunition in the Gulf would appear to be an attempt at the genocide of the Arab peoples by forces in the west.

With this in mind, let’s return to our Disney film. Our Friend the Atom was produced in 1957, and opens with footage from Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea of the Nautilus, which Walt Disney, in person, explains is a prototype from science fiction of the new atomic submarines- those same submarines which make up the British nuclear weapons system, Trident.

Disney then goes on to relate a story from the Arabian Nights; The Fisherman and the Genie. In this narrative, conveyed in an animated section of the film, a fisherman encounters a Genie after pulling a suspiciously shaped lamp from the sea bed in a net. In the version of the story from the 1001 Nights, otherwise known as the Arabian Nights, the lamp is more specifically described as a copper container bearing the magical Seal of Solomon.

The Genie in the Disney version of the tale, once released, is a familiar character to anyone who has seen the Disney Aladdin. It is none other than the same Genie who would be voiced by Robin Williams, in a much more frightening early incarnation. The Genie, a huge, blue presence in the animation, is (in the original 1001 Nights version of the story) afraid that Solomon has turned up to kill him.

The fisherman explains that Solomon has been dead for hundreds of years. Overjoyed, the Genie grants the fisherman a wish- he may choose the manner in which the Genie will kill him.

The Genie explains that for the first part of his imprisonment in the copper container he swore to enrich whoever released him. However as the centuries passed without release, the Genie became bitter- eventually, he had decided that he would simply offer his liberator their choice of deaths.

The fisherman, now terrified, realises his only option is to attempt to trick the Genie, asking how he managed to fit inside the small copper container- and the Genie, in a moment of sheer madness, offers to demonstrate. Closing the lid and re-trapping the Genie, the fisherman threatens to throw the container back into the sea. Eventually, before the fisherman will release him, the Genie is persuaded to grant the fisherman a boon which makes him rich.

Following the animation based on the original tale, Our Friend the Atom cuts back to Disney, who explains that the Genie in the story is actually just like the radioactivity of Uranium, and, admitting that he is a mere storyteller, offers the floor to a respected scientist, who will explain the metaphor in more depth. This scientist is none other than Paperclip’s own Nazi war criminal Heinz Haber.

Haber explains (in front of a black board bearing formulae by Jewish physicist, Albert Einstein) that just like the Genie in the dredged up lamp, the Genie of atomic power is locked up in a rock. To demonstrate, he takes a piece of uranium ore and places it near a Geiger counter. The crackle, he explains, betrays the presence of the Genie inside.

In fact, the Genie really is just like the radioactivity of uranium- it holds the power to grant wishes- whether that wish is for ‘clean’ energy or impossibly deadly weapons, depends on the identity of the human making the wish.

A further bizarre American pop culture reference to Djinn would come in 1965 with the production of TV light comedy I Dream of Jeannie, starring Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman.

The central premise of I Dream of Jeannie seems incredibly strange at first glance- a little too random, or too well chosen to be just an entertainment product. The set-up story, relayed in the animated opening credits of the show relates the following narrative. A NASA astronaut, following the splash down of his re-entry capsule, (the capsule, shaped almost exactly like the container the fisherman dredges out of the ocean in Our Friend the Atom), discovers a mysterious bottle, finding to his surprise that it contains a trapped Genie.

That a TV writer in LA would come up with this premise independently, without knowledge of weird details of the real life story of Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron seems almost impossible to believe. The only logical inference is that Parsons and Cameron had become such a well known subject of Hollywood myth making and gossip, that somebody decided to immortalise them in 1960’s TV land. Parsons and Cameron were transformed in the alchemical crucible of television; from a part of the occult underground in Los Angeles, they were reinvented as a part of the surface of Americana- the subject of a beloved, iconic sit-com. Furthermore, during the animated credits sequence, we are led to make the connection that it is a NASA operative who is the master of the Genie.

This most weird of circumstances, with particular reference to the lamp/module and to the characters of the Fisherman and the Genie from the Disney animation, takes one final turn in the Disney version of Aladdin.

The Disney Aladdin opens in the marketplace of Agrabah, a fictional location which recently featured in Time Magazine, when it emerged that 30% of Republicans the magazine had surveyed were in favour of bombing it.

The panning opening shot scans past a market stall- the stall holder beckons the camera back, and begins to narrate the Aladdin story, claiming that an old lamp he is selling is the very one which features in the famous tale.

The stall holder is none other than the fisherman from Our Friend the Atom- depicted with the exact same nose, moustache and large turban- and before he begins to relate the Aladdin story, he performs a visual gag featuring a now broken copper container- the original lamp from the 1957 film.

The narrative sets up the story of Aladdin using a lamp which the stall holder character is perfectly aware is not the original, having discarded the original in a throw away visual joke involving making French fries.

Similarly, the original terrifying Genie has been transformed into the much more genial character voiced by Robin Williams- the only time we see anything like the original Genie from Our Friend the Atom is at the end of the film, when the Genie character is forced to display his “phenomenal cosmic powers” at the behest of the evil court vizier Jafar, in his attempt at world domination.

Jafar is eventually tricked into making the wish to become a Genie himself, (Disney Genies, unlike Islamic Djinn, appear to lack free will- they are, by 1992, bound to do the bidding of their master) and becomes trapped in another lamp, in exactly the same manner as the fisherman catches the Genie in the 1957 animation.

In the opening scene, the stall holder, acting as narrator, sings the song Arabian Nights, which provides the transition into the story proper. We never see the stall holder again, and he has no further bearing on the story, leading the viewer to perhaps ask exactly why he is included at all.

After all, any of the main characters could have performed the same narrative function as the fisherman/stallholder. It would seem that the character’s inclusion is a mysterious, and yet deliberate reference to the earlier, almost forgotten 1957 film. The character’s real purpose in the Disney Aladdin would seem to be to give the warning with which I’ve opened this article- a warning explicitly against foolishness when dealing with Djinn.

The only other piece of trivia about the Disney Aladdin which seems relevant to our wider story is that when the animators were in the process of designing the lead character, they decided to model the facial features of their Aladdin on that most famous Scientologist, the same man Kenneth Anger fears legal action from if he is ever to publish the third volume of his Hollywood Babylon, Tom Cruise.

The association of nuclear technology with the archetype of the Djinn would appear to have stuck, cropping up in US culture variously as the Douglas AIR-2 Genie nuclear rocket, US power company Genie Energy and as Genie- the General Electric Network for Information Exchange. The genie is by now implicitly understood to be the slave of America- a magical being who makes wishes for light and warmth and various manifestations of power into a reality.

At this stage, it is worthwhile looking at another scriptural tradition associated with our story- the relationship in Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs between Djinn and the Old Testament character of King Solomon.

Solomon, or Suleiman in Islam features in the scriptures of all three major Abrahamic religions. He is a king, but is also known as a magician in possession of a magical ring bearing a sigil which gives him command over demons in the Judaic and Christian versions of the story- demons which become further identified as Djinn in the Islamic version.

Highly significantly, Solomon is granted this power by God in answer to Solomon’s prayers. As we know by now, such prayers and wishes are often known to backfire on the wisher. This does not appear to be the case with Solomon, and this would seem to be the result of the nature of Solomon’s original wish.

Solomon, the story says, did not pray for weapons that would give him power over the world. He did not pray for unlimited free energy for everyone. Solomon prayed that God would grant him wisdom; the only possible wish he could make which would not backfire on him.

Solomon, it would appear, was smart enough to realise that the only sure way to change the world for the better was to start with himself. This is as good a differentiation between definitions of black and white magic as I can think of- white magic aims to change the magician, bringing them closer to a state of grace, where black magic attempts to change the world outside the magician, which deforms the world.

The Seal of Solomon is a six pointed star comprised of two overlaid equilateral triangles- today, the symbol is recognised in two separate, but linked contexts. It is known as an emblem of the Jewish peoples they use to represent themselves, such as on the national flag of Israel, or as an emblem the Jewish people have been identified by, by those groups throughout history who have attempted genocide against them- such as the stars sewn onto the clothes of Jews in the death camps of Nazi Europe.

Solomon is believed to have used the Seal to command the demons or Djinn at his command to build the first Temple in Jerusalem. In the Judaic and Christian versions of the story, Solomon commands the demon Asmodeus, the incarnation of demonic Lust. However, in the Islamic version of the tale, Solomon commands powerful Djinn by virtue of his magical Seal.

This same Seal is mentioned in the Arabian Nights as being inscribed on the stopper of the container our friend the fisherman dredges out of the sea. This gives a clue as to the possible identity of the copper vessel.

Following the completion of the Temple, and the transportation of the throne of the Queen of Sheba instantly across time/space from her throne room to Solomon’s, the magician king imprisoned the demonic Djinn in a container, a kind of magical prison. The final resting place of this vessel is not explicitly stated, though fantasy writer Neil Gaiman places it in the possession of Haroun Al Rashid in his epic of modern myth The Sandman.

In Gaiman’s story Ramadan, Rashid threatens to destroy the vessel, releasing the imprisoned Djinn, unless granted a boon by Morpheus, the King of Dreams. The Dream-king will not be persuaded to appear, and so Rashid hurls the vessel from a high rooftop. It is caught before it can break by Morpheus, none too pleased to have been summoned in such a perfunctory manner.

In the end, Morpheus and Rashid come to an understanding and strike a deal. Rashid receives his boon. The king of dreams grants the wish in his own unique manner. Rashid’s wish is that his city, the greatest city of the world, Baghdad, should be preserved at its height for all time. If the golden age of Baghdad can be preserved, Rashid is prepared to offer the city to Morpheus, and give him the vessel containing the destructive Djinn.

The golden age of Baghdad is indeed preserved; in the only manner the Lord of Stories would ever preserve it- as stories; as the stories of the Arabian Nights, including both Aladdin and the original version of the Fisherman and the Genie, where we find an indication of the final destiny of the container- lost at sea, and dragged to the surface in the fisherman’s net.

Gaiman’s story ends in modern day Baghdad, with an old man telling stories to a young boy, who is depicted walking home through the ruins of the city, his mind filled with tales of Djinn and magic lamps. Thus, the Golden City of Baghdad is preserved, passed from lip to ear throughout the centuries.

The stories of Djinn still echo through western culture in surprising ways, somehow turning up in unexpected places. Time Magazine ran a feature on March 30th 2016, entitled Trump Wants to Free the Nuclear Genie, in which they outlined then-presidential-hopeful Donald Trump’s plans to make US allies build their own nuclear weapons, recommending that South Korea and Japan develop a nuclear arsenal to counter the threat of nuclear war from North Korea. Anti nuclear weapons campaigners were dumbfounded, but they would not be only ones to become stunned into silence by some of Trump’s ideas.

In the article, there is a quote from the president of the non profit, anti-nuclear Ploughshares Fund, Joseph Cirincione, in which he states that “John F Kennedy started the effort to get the Non-Proliferation Treaty because Japan and Germany- countries we had just defeated in war- were researching nuclear weapons programs”. He goes on to express disbelief that Trump would casually recommend a policy which would increase the number of nuclear weapons in the world, and the number of countries with a deadly nuclear capability.

John F Kennedy was unable to change the world, and died in the most significant political assassination in US history, perhaps thanks to those same forces which inspired Dwight Eisenhower to warn about the military industrial complex and Jack Parsons to question if he was living in a country which even understood what freedom was, back in 1946.

The results of the infiltration of the US establishment by former Nazis following the second world war are far reaching and complex- far too complex for this article, but few would deny that the far right have managed to infiltrate aspects of the American military, media, business establishment, political system, penal system, legal system and police, leading to engrained prejudice, division and violence in American society. This division can only have begun during the Civil War of 1861-5, which was fought over the right of whites to own non-white slaves.

Influential people in American society, who believed in such ideas were quick to welcome the former Nazis of Project Paperclip. It is notable how many former Nazi personnel ended up living in former Confederate states, and how many became card carrying Republicans. The Confederate transformed into a new kind of American Neo Nazi.

Interestingly, it is overwhelmingly these far right wing voices in Republican politics who repeatedly make the overt connection between nuclear weaponry and the mythological archetype of the Genie. One need only search online for the photographs of Walt Disney, Werner Von Braun and Heinz Haber relaxing on the set of Our Friend The Atom, to remind ourselves how deeply these war criminals were accepted into the centre of Americana.

Donald Trump has talked of making Muslim Americans wear some kind of symbol to mark them out. He has also made the claim that he will build a wall on the US-Mexico border a central part of his successful campaign for the US presidency, and has made various appointments of individuals with links to far right organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the far right media.

Many Republicans do not consider Trump a real Republican, and claim that his far right rhetoric does not fairly represent the views of the Republican Party. They don’t recognise him as a Republican, but they mostly stop short of explicitly stating what they do recognise about him. All they know is that somehow, this man who wants to bring all the excitement of the 1930’s back to US politics is now the President-Elect. The king.

They are terrified that Trump now has command over the nuclear arsenal of the US military, when his campaign could not leave him in control of his social media accounts without him posting something unbelievably crass at 3am.

Trump appears to be bringing fascist elements in American society out of the cold and back into the bosom of the Washington political establishment- how long can it be before the Klan reveals their true numbers with a march on a scale comparable to the marches of the 1920s?

Mexican Americans have a right to be angry about how Trump has portrayed them during his campaign, but they should also worry about the appointment of the far right Neo Nazi elements to the Trump team; some Mexican Americans can still recall the first time American Nazis attacked them before. Most Americans cannot.

In 1947, Paperclip US Nazi scientists working on rockets at the White Sands base in New Mexico sabotaged the guidance system of a seized Nazi V2 rocket, sending it crashing into the hills near the town of Alamogordo. Following the incident, which nobody seemed to find amusing, V2 experiments at White Sands were cancelled.

Now Trump is king, like old Solomon, and like Solomon, he has a host of Genies at his command. We know that genies grant wishes, and that we have been warned against making foolish wishes, due to their habit of returning to plague the wisher.

Solomon wished for wisdom, and safely commanded the creatures of elemental fire. Now Trump has that same mythic level of power, now he has command over the legions of Djinn, what kind of wishes do you imagine he will make?

Aladdin, a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a popular star of Hollywood film, uses his last wish to release the Genie. We see the Genie’s fetters drop away. He is free. Aladdin and Princess Jasmine disappear into the night sky on their wonderful flying carpet.

The Arabian moon hanging over the clouds and desert dunes below rotates, revealing the Genie’s face on its reverse side. The Genie laughs.

The Sultan turns to Scheherazade. “Is that all? And what comes next? What becomes of Aladdin and the Princess? What becomes of the Djinn?”

“I am tired- I have said enough for this evening. I will finish the story tomorrow, my love.”

“Then you shall live, and tell me another tale tomorrow night.”

The Sultan shuts his eyes and Scheherazade lightly kisses his forehead.

“So I shall. Now, sleep; may Allah bless you with dreams as sweet as honey.”

Roll credits.

Issue 22 - "Like Private Eye for extremists"

BUMPER ISSUE! Features - Anarchist Zombies; Words of Wisdom from Chairman Vic; Universal Credit; Interviews with Ian Bone & Timo Vuorensola; Resistance in Palestine; Charlie Hebdo Attack and much more

If you liked this...

Issue 19 - " Produced by four teenage Viz readers in a shed with a dog called Spliff"

Healthy cooking, veganism, cancer cures and unhealthy comics, babies and paranoia. Plus Iron Sky film director interview, reviews and a free T'Pau magazine for idiots.

"If you wanted to put Paul Knight's novel 'A Trail of Burnt Paper' into a shareholder pleasing box you might compare it to Japanese horror film 'The Ring'... The writing can be brutal at times, at other times it is controlled and delicate. It hasn't been edited into a neater style or more conventional structure but that is part of its beauty"- ARENA Magazine.

I Dream of Genie OrA postscript to the Arabian Nights: The tale of the Astronaut and the Djinn Paul Knight

Issue 22 - "Like Private Eye for extremists"

If you liked this...

Issue 19 - " Produced by four teenage Viz readers in a shed with a dog called Spliff"

I Dream of Genie
Or
A postscript to the Arabian Nights: The tale of the Astronaut and the Djinn

Paul Knight