Genies and Demons and Muses, Oh My

Hi,

Full disclosure: I don’t want to write about politics, inflation, mass shootings, or anything else in the news today. Fortunately, I don’t have to because this “news”letter is mine. If the genie from I Dream of Jeannie were here to grant me three wishes, I’d wish her to just blink a fully written G-File into existence. Although to be honest, if there were a limit on the wishes, today’s G-File would go unwritten because I wouldn’t waste a wish on this—unless the whole “more wishes” thing was in the cards. But since I’m on my own, I’m going to do what I often do: have fun with words and see where that takes me. If that’s not for you, come back Friday or check out our other wares at The Dispatch.

Younger readers may not remember or know about the TV show I Dream of Jeannie, and frankly they’re not missing much because it wasn’t very good. I mean I watched it, but even as a kid I could tell it wasn’t exactly well-written. Then again, it didn’t need to be. Barbara Eden with a bare midriff and some double-entendres carried a lot of the load in the writer’s room (though the double-entendres were pretty tame compared to Three’s Company, which premiered a few years after I Dream of Jeannie was finally canceled because—spoiler—no one wanted to watch it after they got married and all the sexual tension vanished). You could hardly blame a writer if he had a few extra gin and tonics at lunch.

The premise of I Dream of Jeannie was that astronaut Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) finds a bottle on the beach and it turns out to be occupied by a 2,000-year-old genie who, for reasons never quite laid out in the text but fairly obvious in the subtext, is a hot blonde played by an actress whose family tree goes back to Ben Franklin, not Muhammad.

“Jeannie” is of course a play on “Genie,” which has a more interesting etymology. It’s derived from “genius,” which, prior to describing unparalleled intellects like Lex Luthor, Donald Trump’s physicist uncle, or Vizzini in The Princess Bride, meant—according to the Romans—a guiding or guardian spirit. Long after it entered the English language, people would refer to someone “having a genius” in the sense of a Muse-like attendant whispering or breathing insight or inspiration into the artist. It wasn’t until well into the 1600s that genius started to refer to natural or innate ability.

“Genie” enters the lexicon when Arabian Nights gets translated into French and then English. In pre-Islamic Arab societies there were jinn (apparently jinn is properly considered a collective noun, jinni is singular. But though I love words, I hate grammar, so we’ll leave that there like an old flan on a prison cafeteria tray). Jinni sounded a lot like genies—not just homophonically but conceptually. So that’s how jinnis became genies.

The jinn (or the Romanized djinn) were a whole class of spirits or demons, only a few of whom lived in lamps and granted wishes. And again, pretty much by coincidence, they often played the same role as geniuses. Kings would call on friendly jinn to aid them in their endeavors. People would wear images of specific jinn as good luck charms—sort of like patron saints—that they’d call upon to intercede on their behalf to ward off death or writer’s block. I did not know until 10:54 a.m.. today that Muhammed was sent as a prophet not just to humanity but to the jinn as well. The Hebrews had their own version of jinn, the shedim. It’s unclear—to me—whether Muhammed had anything to say to them.

Not all jinn are demons and not all demons are jinn, but it certainly seems like they’re all members of the same listserv, theologically speaking. This is because jinn—in most traditions—have free will just like humans, so they can choose to be evil or good. And since a supernatural, shapeshifting spirit that chooses to be evil seems pretty hard to distinguish from a demon, you can see why people might conflate the two.

Demons, meanwhile, are originally Greek. Or, I should say, the word “demon” has its origins in Greek. For the Greeks, daimōn (daemon in Latin), like jinn, weren’t necessarily evil. They were simply spirits or (lesser) gods that, like geniuses, jinn, and other ethereal beings, visited or inspired people for one reason or another. Again, think of the Muses, the theological Adderall of the ancient Greeks. These goddesses of poetry, literature, music, etc. would visit artists and give them an injection of inspiration. Plato writes that Socrates was visited by daimōn on the regular to churn out his quality musings. Inspiration literally means “breathe into,” which is what all of these supernatural beings did to get artists and poets (though perhaps not “news”letter writers) to hit their deadlines so successfully that no one would ask for a refund.

Anyway, if you think this “news”letter is already a self-indulgent spelunking expedition into linguistic rabbit holes, you’re right! But you’d also really get pissed if I kept digging passed the leporine realm into the chthonic one. In case you didn’t know, “leporine” is an adjective for all things rabbit-ish. So you could say that when Bugs Bunny wanted to up the bounty on him by sawing off the state of Florida from North America, it was the greatest act of leporine villainy in all of popular culture (not including the making of Donnie Darko or Night of the Lepus, of course).

The chthonic realm is the underworld, as understood by the ancient Greeks. The good gods, for the most part, lived in the heavens atop Mount Olympus—where there’s always ample parking. The bad gods, for the most part, lived below the rabbits, the mole men, Gorgs, boggarts, CHUDs, and Sidney Blumenthal, but probably not the clown in It. Hades and Persephone were the king and queen of the underworld. Some people use chthonic more broadly today to talk about any demon or anything demonic that ostensibly comes from the subterranean zip codes.

Did I mention that the bottle used in I Dream of Jeannie was actually a special edition decanter of Jim Beam called Beam’s Choice? The art department gussied it up with some beads and gold leaf paint, no doubt after the writers emptied it. Or perhaps Hagman himself did. He admitted many times that he was drunk for a lot of the time he was on screen.

Hagman had that monkey on his back for most of his life. In a previous era, one might even describe that monkey as a demon. Indeed, the phrase “personal demons” is a psychological phrase referring to parts of our nature that we struggle to control. But given all of the above, I can’t help but think the idea is much older than that. The devil whispering on our shoulder is a very old idea. It’s sort of like the changing meaning of genius. Where once a genius was a spirit that breathed inspiration, it’s now something we have as part of our nature. But as we’ve seen, there was a time personal demons were thought of as more literal. (There’s a great scene in Game of Thrones where Davos Seaworth is talking to Tormund about how Stannis had “demons in his head” and Tormund asks, “You’ve seen these demons?”) Hagman had his demons, which he freely admitted.

The duality of his … rich life, one might say, was captured in his single, “Ballad of the Good Luck Charm/My Favorite Sins.” The protagonist of this serenade of the alamo has a “good luck charm” who says in the refrain, “Hush up your mind, I ain’t gonna die. ‘Cause I got a good luck charm/Ain’t nobody can hurt me, do me no harm.”

But then Hagman warbles, “He was singing his damn fool song about his dang fool charm when they shot his dang fool head off.” Apparently, the jinn of the charm was locked in a bottle of Beam’s Choice.

Meanwhile, “My Favorite Sins,” the B-side of the single, is a cringe-inducing homage to the joys of committing demonic evil. Hearing his brother cry “is like a sweet violin.” “Y’all come and drink to my favorite sins” he literally cackles at the end, like a terrible voice from within a bottle of Beam’s Choice.

Generally, I think it’s good that we moderns have abandoned the practice of outsourcing our accomplishments and sins to external pixies. But I think it comes at a cost. As I wrote last week, when we psychologize everything, reducing all pathologies to “root causes” and the like, we drain ourselves of a sense of agency. Maybe it would be easier to get off the sauce—or off our asses—if we didn’t conceive of such things as the ineluctable product of the “system” or of our “genes” dealing us a bad hand. Perhaps if we thought our bad genes were actually bad genies we could muster the will and courage to fight them off. Thinking of evil muses inspiring us to do wrong, instead of bad wiring or amorphous impersonal forces, just might make it easier to say, “Not today, Satan” (a phrase the internet insists was coined on Ru Paul’s drag queen reality show). It’s Beam’s Choice, not Beam’s Will.

And that brings me, literally, to the point of this “news”letter. For the last few years, I’ve wanted to use a stupid pun but I could never figure out a way to work it into anything. I apologize, perhaps too late for some of you, for taking you on this ride, but since I didn’t want to do punditry it served as my muse. I didn’t know how I’d get there when I started typing a couple of hours ago. But here we are.

It seems to me that if you were going to make a dark movie about the man who played Captain Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie, you might call it, Jinn and Chthonic: The True Story of Larry Hagman.

I’ll show myself out.