Honestly? Rob, that's the best reaction you could have. As my Craft informants would say, you are "grounded in reality"Originally Posted by Rob Thornton
Marc,
Wow. Honestly I'd never thought about it from the perspective of using other theologies or mystical spiritualism - that seems wrong to my western sense of things (I'll have to consider why I feel that way). Honestly before last night, I did not know that a djinn was different from a demon or a ghost - one of our Shiite interpreters explained it to me and promised to explain more. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable trying to use it as an active sort of thing personally (although I'm not above advocating its exploration for possible uses) - for me its more of a passive sort of incorporation into understanding the environment which brings forth both the people I work with and those we work against.
.
BTW, Djinn are very different from demons and ghosts. The Western equivalent of the Djin is the Nephilim or, hmmm, the "blood right" sort of captures it (the children / lineage of Nephilim and Humans). In Celtic terms, the Tuatha de Danaan or half breeds between the children of the stars and humans.
If you aren't into this type of stuff, stay away from it <wry grin>. The absolutely best thing you can do is to learn what other "mortals" learn, i.e. the general Muslim view of it, and not play around with it. There are groups and families in the West who know about this stuff (I've mentioned some earlier), but this isn't something for the psyops or I/O crowd to use - they would totally mess it up.
The real trick in all of this is that mystics of all traditions are actually closer to each other than they are to their co-religionists, as are the magicians in each tradition. A Wiccan combat magic specialist can probably understand AQ's people better than a theologian, and a practitioner of Seitha is more likely to understand your BTN CDR on exorcisms than most priests, or battalion Commanders, would <wry grin>.
Please take my advice on this, and don't try to do it yourself! Ask questions, learn about it, but don't try and use it in any active, I/O way.
<wry grin>Hmmm, not really, although there are corrolaries. Most of the versions I have read are sitautions where the Green Man lnows more than Moses and Moses ends up going through all sorts of situations / trials until he finally realizes that the Green Man knows more.
In many Islamic tradiitons, Moses is the archetype for magical knowledge while the Green Man is the archetype for intuitive knowledge (at least that's my understanding of it which could well be wrong). The "formalism" of magic is inherent in Moses and the Jews, cf. comments in the Economist article on the power of Jewish magic (actually, they are the Seals of Soloman). This is contrasted with the "intuitive knowledge" of the Green Man who "knows" (in greek, it's "gnosis") the will of God.
I think that this is an area that is definately worth looking at, but I would urge extreme caution. In many ways, I would love to come over to <Mosul and chat with your BTN CDR <grin>. I suspect that we wopuld understand each other quite well
Marc
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