Magic and the Djinn in the Enchanted Lamp

In narrative history, the djinn doesn’t always live in a small container; nor does he always fulfill people’s wishes. But when he does, we can be sure that the storyteller is telling us about desire—and about magic. Aladdin’s tale in A Thousand and One Nights draws from medieval Arab, Persian, and Jewish myth and mysticism to define magic and simultaneously explain how to wield it. In a sense, Aladdin is the ultimate magician.

Director George Miller’s THREE-THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING is a film adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s 1994 novella “Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” and features a modern-day Aladdin, a modern-day djinn and, thus, a modern approach to magical power. Both the film and the novella offer a revisioning of “Aladdin and His Enchanted Lamp,” adopting its most commanding theme and centering a wish-fulfilling djinn who inhabits an enchanted container. Who is he? What is he? What is meant by this figure who makes the impossible possible, and the non-physical physical?

November 16, 2022

Recording available on demand through the Philosophical Research Society. Click here.