Bones and dung as sustenance: How anthropology of the supernatural can help us understand the jinn
Introduction
In Prophetic hadiths, we find some interesting details about feeding habits of the jinn:
The delegate of jinn of (the city of) Nasibin came to me--and how nice those jinn were--and asked me for the remains of the human food. I invoked Allah for them that they would never pass by a bone or animal dung but find food on them. [Source]
They (the jinn) asked him (the Holy Prophet ﷺ) about their provision and he said: Every bone on which the name of Allah is recited is your provision. The time it will fall in your hand it would be covered with flesh, and the dung of (the camels) is fodder for your animals. [Source]
These and other hadiths suggest that the jinn feed on material things. But if that's the case, why do the material - the bones and dung in this case - not simply disappear? To step back, why do supernatural beings need to feed on the material to begin with? These should be easy to answer: there's no reason to expect jinn feeding habits to resemble ours. The second hadith specifically indicates that the jinn aren’t chomping down on the bone itself, just the flesh that supernaturally appears on them.
In this post, we’ll go a step further to demonstrate that this detail - supernatural entities partaking in human, material food without consuming it - is indirectly corroborated by the anthropology of supernatural beliefs. This micro-level case study would hopefully show that, as with other empirical disciplines, Muslims also stand to benefit from parapsychological research as it can reinforce or clarify otherwise puzzling details found in scripture (in line with the general agenda set out in the outline post of this blog).
Our case proceeds in three steps. Firstly, we argue that animistic beliefs - belief in, and worship of, nature spirits living in trees and rocks and other inanimate objects - probably have a veridical basis; in that people’s beliefs in these spirits are based on their actual encounters with supernatural agents. We then demonstrate that it’s plausible, or at least not implausible, that these nature spirits are the same entities a Muslim would recognize as the jinn. If these two steps are secured, a study of animistic beliefs about these spirits should be informative about the nature and capacities of the jinn as well. As a case study, we show how this approach leads us to identify similarities between the feeding habits of nature spirits and the jinn, but of course this can possibly extend to many other examples. Overall, this would demonstrate how the cross-talk between Muslim beliefs about jinn and anthropology of the supernatural can be informative and useful.
“Nature spirits”, whatever they may be, probably exist
Perhaps the most striking aspect of animism is its ubiquity. Animistic beliefs are extremely widespread in human cultures, including pockets of society that had no interaction with each other. Well, if people with no earthly connection to each other keep independently converging on the same set of beliefs, that gives us reason to think that they are forming these beliefs on the basis of shared experiences. The atheist philosopher Tiddy Smith makes a formal version of this case based on a survey of hunter-gatherer societies. Although (it seems) he was being tongue-in-cheek to parody the popular common consent argument for theism, the case he makes is solid as far as it goes.
Over a hundred years ago, the anthropologist Andrew Lang made a more nuanced version of this argument: he observed that not only do animistic societies agree on the content of their beliefs, they also share similarities with modern-day reports of supernatural phenomena. In his The Making of Religion, Lang analyzes five kinds of supernatural or paranormal phenomena reported in these societies: clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, veridical ‘hallucinations’ of living individuals, demon possessions, and fetishism or objects acting autonomously against the laws of nature, presumably due to spirit activity. The fact that such a wide array of events is found to be common among us “moderns”, as well as in a large number of less technologically advanced cultures across the world, suggest that there’s a shared set of experiences being pulled from in both contexts. Here’s how the philosopher Stephen Braude makes this argument:
Moreover, as Gauld and Cornell's recent survey of poltergeist and haunting cases demonstrates, non experimental case reports frequently agree on peculiar and unexpected details, despite the fact that the reports are made independently of one another, and often under quite different social and cultural conditions (Gauld and Cornell, 1979). Among these details are: the slow and gentle trajectories of airborne objects, the apparent passage of levitated objects through walls and closed doors, and the poltergeist bombardment with human excrement. Since until recently victims of poltergeist disturbances have tended to be unfamiliar both with the literature on the subject (if any existed) and with other contemporaneous cases of the same kind, it seems to me that such convergence of independent testimony cannot easily be brushed aside. Furthermore, when close examination of poltergeist cases suggests strongly that those involved share no common underlying needs to experience or report phenomena of this sort (especially in their details), and in the absence of any reasonable proposals as to what such needs might be, we simply have to entertain seriously the hypothesis that the phenomena occurred largely as reported. [The Limits of Influence, p. 27]
Lang similarly mentions such “peculiar and unexpected details” shared between these reports, e.g., gazing into a smooth deep to foretell events at a distance, be that the modern-day crystal, or a hole filled with water, blood, ink, etc; or the need to tie up the shaman during possession by a spirit. Taken together, the widespread agreement on these beliefs - both at the levels of broad strokes and the nitty-gritty - suggest that at least some of them are based on genuine supernatural encounters.
Nature spirits are probably jinn
If nature spirits are genuine supernatural agents, can they be identified with what Muslims would take to be the jinn? The descriptions of jinn in Islamic scripture are nondescript enough to map onto virtually any non-human supernatural creatures, but we can nonetheless point to similarities in the behavior of these two groups. Winfried Corduan in his In the Beginning God: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism observes that nature spirits are portrayed to be "fickle, demanding and selfish" [p. 40 in EPUB version].
The typical mode of worship offered to these creatures is not sincere, prayerful devotion - but instead, material offerings as a negotiating tactic to extract favors. These behaviors explain why animistic religions tend to be unmoral - they don't come associated with a moral code for people to follow, simply because the deities and their commands are too transactional to base a moral system on. Supernatural beings constantly asking for offerings in exchange for materialistic favors while not inspiring piety of any sort seems in line with Muslim beliefs about ill-intentioned jinn. Furthermore, Islam occasionally associates jinn activity with the origin of polytheistic beliefs.
Incidentally, this strategy of identifying supernatural phenomena with jinn or demonic activity has been deployed by Christians as well. In their book Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men: A Rational Christian Look at UFOs and Extraterrestrials, Ross, Rana and Clark examine features of alien encounters to draw the following conclusion:
Only one kind of being favors the dead of night and lonely roads. Only one is real but nonphysical, animate, powerful, deceptive, ubiquitous throughout human history, culture, and geography, and bent on wreaking psychological and physical harm. Only one entity selectively approaches those humans involved in cultic, occultic, or New Age activities. It seems apparent that [UFOs], in one or more ways, must be associated with the activities of demons. [p. 78]
Along the same lines, we don’t think it’s implausible to suggest that nature spirits are yet another manifestation of jinn activity.
How do these “jinn-deities” eat?
If these nature spirits are jinn, can we learn anything about jinn behavior by examining their feeding habits? Here’s how Winfried Corduan discusses how “offerings” to these spirits would look:
Animistic cultures typically make abundant sacrifices to the spirits; frequently, they speak of “the spirits being fed.” If I may take an example from a highly developed culture, it is an important part of Chinese religion to present food to the ancestor spirits. The spirits, if they are so inclined, will consume the “essence” of this food and leave behind its material remnant, which can then be eaten by human beings. Sacrifices, in this sense, are ways of negotiating with the gods and spirits. The spiritual beings profit from what is being given them, and the human being hopes that his sacrifices will generate particular help from the spirits or gods. This attitude underlies much of the motivation in animism. [p. 143 in EPUB version. Emphases ours.]
Some interesting themes to emerge from this are:
The spirits feed on material offerings, not supernatural ones;
The feeding does not consume the material itself.
This seems in line with what the hadiths imply about jinn feeding: as with the offerings, the food is material and tangible; and whatever the jinn mode of eating is, the bones and dung themselves aren’t used up. What might strike one as a puzzling detail about the jinn, therefore, seems to be at least indirectly corroborated by this route.
What this tells us about the importance of parapsychology
As discussed in our outline article, one of the goals of Islamic parapsychology is to posit supernatural hypotheses that are consistent with Islam to explain phenomena that seem to contradict it. Starting from the companions of the Prophet, the classical Islamic scholars down to the present day have employed different variations of this strategy.
A bottleneck of this approach, however, is that scripture itself doesn’t provide very specific information about the motivations, behaviors, and capacities of the jinn beyond what is necessary for the average Muslim to know. Obviously, if we want to construct jinn-centric explanations for problematic parapsychological phenomena (an extremely niche pursuit), we would need more information about them. This gap in explanatory resources can be narrowed with the knowledge gleaned from field experiences of exorcists and, secondarily, the writings of classical scholars discussing the topic.
Our excursion into anthropology provides another possible such avenue: if supernatural beliefs in other cultures seem similar to jinn activities, we can potentially study other beliefs associated with them to learn more about jinn behavior. Such new knowledge can either reinforce what we already know from scripture, or provide fresh Islam-consistent theories to be employed to explain problematic parapsychological phenomena.