Thread by @aaolomi

In Islamic & Middle Eastern cosmology, some djinn/jinn are famous figures. Many of these are drawn from folklore, rather than orthodoxy likely the product of Islam interacting with local legends. One is Aicha Kandicha from Morocco.

A quick thread on this fascinating djinn

There is some debate if Aicha Kandicha is actually a djinn or a related type of spirit. She is imagined as a beautiful woman with alluring eyes, voice, long black hair, and the feet of a camel.

Sometimes it is said her hair is so long it covers her whole body.

Aicha Kandicha is said to lure men into the desert and kill them. She is related in some ways to the ghul and sil’at class of djinn I mentioned in the previous thread.

She’s a spirit of lust, desire, and madness.

Her origin is obscure. She may have been a pre-Islamic Phoenician fertility deity, as she is often associated with water, or perhaps a local spirit that became a djinn as the region was Islamized.

Another theory believes she was once a living noble woman, a Muslim, who fell in love with an Iberian non-Muslim man, but was jilted and heartbroken thus she became a vengeful spirit.

The vengeful lover archetype is common in folklore (see the Central American La Llorona)

Among Sufi circles she's part of a group of “Aicha” djinn that appear throughout the region of North Africa as spirits of possession. She's reputed to be the daughter of the djinn king Shamhurish & a spirit of unbridled lust.

Ecstatic gnawa music rites are used to exorcise her

But my favorite theory, from Professor Douider’s work, says she was actually an anti-colonial resistance fighter.

Aicha Kandicha was a woman or group of women who would lure colonial soldiers out into the desert where they would be set upon by resistance fighters.

In this origin myth, the camel feet is likely a symbolic reference to the camel raids led by resistance fighters.

Aicha Kandicha would use her charms to draw soldiers right into the arms of the resistance and her description of having camel feet is a memory of this

Aicha Kandicha became a notorious legend among colonial forces, as Portuguese and later French troops were warned against the dangerous and seductive powers of the djinn.

She has also become a feminist symbol of subversive sexuality in modern times.

So what is she? Ancient goddess turned djinn? Jilted lover? Secret anti-colonial resistance fighter using her sexuality to protect her people?

Perhaps she’s a little of each, like all good folklore she preserves a bit of all these origins.

Next week, I'm thinking between a thread on djinn and astrology or the djinn kings. Not sure yet