The world was swept up in a mini-Satanic Panic this Holy Week when Lil Nas X released an exclusive limited edition “Satan sneaker” that features a pentagram and a drop of blood in the sole. The announcement provoked a shrill backlash from conservative commentators and politicians. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem complained that, “We are in a fight for the soul of our nation” while Candace Owens inexplicably linked the shoes to the murder of George Floyd and suggested that their valorization contributes to “keeping Black America behind.” A public that has no problem with a blonde Sabrina sitting on the throne of Satan is suddenly up in arms about a queer Black rendition of our religious history. If the devil isn’t wearing Prada, it seems, we are faintly horrified.
The shoes, which were at first advertised as Nike but have since been disavowed by the athleticwear giant, sold out in under a minute. Their announcement corresponds to the release of the music video for Lil Nas X’s (real name Montero Lamar Hill) ‘MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name).’ While the music video initially drew attention for the controversial scene in which Lil Nas X gives Satan a lapdance, the video is filled with Greek, Latin, and Christian imagery and motifs. Everything from the Garden of Eden to early Christian martyrdom to Plato and Aristophanes make an appearance. As an excellent piece in Time unpacked, this isn’t just about shock value: the three-minute video intelligently recasts classical and religious concepts and subversively overlays them with queer iconography and self-love.
The shoes themselves are relatively innocuous. The limited edition run of 666 pairs of customized Air Max 97 sneakers retailed for $1,018 a pop. The red and Black sneakers, which allegedly contain a drop of blood and 60cc of red ink in the heel, are individually numbered and are most distinctive for the inclusion of a pentagram on the laces. The shoes also include a reference to Luke 10:18 (in which Jesus says “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”).
The pentagram only recently became associated with the demonic, however. Beyond its use in ancient Sumerian religion and among Pythagoreans, the Pentagram was also a symbol for the senses and the wounds of Christ. The pentagram was so neutral that it adorns the north rose of the 13th century cathedral in the French city of Amiens. It was really only in the Romantic period that people began to distinguish between “right side up” and “upside down” pentagrams and dubbed the latter a symbol of evil. In that same way, blood isn’t the property of Satan. Beyond its medical uses, blood serves a salvific purpose in Christianity.
The idea that shoes could be shocking to Christians is nothing new. According to Clement of Alexandria, some ancient courtesans had erotic scenes carved into the bottom of their sandals (Paedagogus 2.18). In the ancient world that informs ‘Montero,’ University of Iowa historian Sarah Bond told me, shoes like this had some very specific socio-economic connotations and were used to advertise sexual services. The fact that the Tyrian purple dye used to color some ancient shoes was made from the mucus of a sea snail, she added, means that we should probably chill out a bit about the blood. It’s an ancient shoe decorating technique.
This is before we even get to the fact that Satan may not have be able to wear these shoes. In the New Testament the devil is various portrayed as a lion or dragon, but when he is human early Christian tradition often describes him as deformed. Meghan Henning, a professor at the University of Dayton, told me that several texts describe him as having broad feet, misshapen legs, and broken toes: “The anti-Christ is described with human characteristics that had negative connotations. In these descriptions he has a range of characteristics, including thin legs, thin lips, one fat lip, no knees, big eyebrows, and big feet.”
The late antique Coptic Elijah Apocalypse, for example, describes the antichrist as “somewhat…young, thin‑legged, while on the front of his head is a place (lock) of white hair… His eyebrows reach even to his ears, while leprosy scales are on his hands.” The roughly contemporary Greek Apocalypse of Ezra pictures the antichrist as having the face of “a wild man. His right eye is like a star rising at dawn and the other is unmoving. His mouth is one cubit, his teeth are a span long, his fingers like scythes, [and] the soles of his feet two span” Though the Book of Job shows Satan walking around quite easily, in later Christian tradition there is clearly something going on with Satan’s feet. The fairly consistent portrayal of the demonic as misshapen (sorry, fans of Lucifer), Henning told me, is part of ancient practice of associating bad character with culturally undesirable bodily characteristics. The bad emperor Caligula, for example, was also rumored to have over-sized feet.
Over time Satan developed some goat-like characteristics including horns and cloven hooves. The origin of the idea of Satan as goatlike seems to be a parable about the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 in which it is prophesied that the Son of Man (Jesus) “will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.” In the parable the sheep are associated with the saved and the goats with the damned. The fashioning of the demonic figure Baphomet as goat-like, which may have begun as early as the medieval period, further augmented perceptions of Satan’s body. Just like the Pentagram, however, the use of the goat as an image for Satan really took off in the 19th century. It was then that the esoteric poet Éliphas Lévi drew his famous image of the Sabbatical Goat, a goat-headed and goat-footed demon whose form influences everything from modern Satanism to Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Today, the Church of Satan uses a pentagramshaped goat’s head (the Sigil of Baphomet) as their official insignia.
All of which raises the question, could Satan even wear these sneakers? It seems unlikely or at least deeply uncomfortable. That we are so easily scandalized by some red and black customization makes us part of the commentary and part of the joke. Those who are outraged don’t seem to understand “their” cultural heritage that well.
The underpinnings of ‘Montero’’s understanding and portrayal of Satan is also directly related to the weaponization of hell and eternal torture against members of the LGBT+ community. Lil Nas X’s descent to hell, lapdance, and murder of Satan is a way of wresting control away from the ‘moral majority’ who have controlled the conversation in the past. He uses his sexuality to conquer and control those who have terrorized young Black men in the past. In his home state of Georgia, Great Awakening-style “fire and brimstone” Christianity is still very popular, especially in Black churches; people always threatened him by saying he was going to hell, so he went to hell, and he conquered it. ‘Montero’ shows other Black gay people and the world more broadly that they are stronger than (their) demons. And when people come after him on Twitter, he skillfully bats them away, just as he does in his art. As he himself says, he had nine months to plan the rollout, his Rosemary’s Baby is full term.
Naturally, the combination of the imagery from the video and the shoes have drawn criticism from religious adherents and leaders across the globe who claim that the artist is trying to promote “Satanism.” One might assume that when these leaders say Satanism, they mean turning to devil-worship, but the reality of organized Satanism in America is quite different.
In the U.S,, there are two major organizations that claim the “satanist” title. The aforementioned Church of Satan, founded in 1966 by musician and carnival worker Anton Szandor LaVey, the author of the hedonistic Satanic Bible. And a newer church, the Satanic Temple, which was created in 2012 by the so-called Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, who formed the group in response to President George Bush’s “White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships” which aims to provide support to community religious organizations. The group focuses on activism, the separation of church and state, advocating for abortion rights, and LGBT+ rights. It made headlines in 2015, when they unveiled a statue of the goat-headed god Baphomet in Detroit, in response to the erection of a statue of the Ten Commandments on the site of the Oklahoma state capitol in order to test the extent of U.S. religious tolerance.
Ironically, neither of these groups, whose iconography features prominently in Lil Nas X’s work Satan Shoes, actually believe in Satan. Rather, both groups use Satan’s biblical role as the “Adversary” and occult imagery as way of resisting conservative Abrahamic religious norms. Lil Nas X’s project is similar. He is trying to provoke a conversation about queerness, religion, and self-love by sparking outrage over his use of satanic imagery, and the crowd he wants to react is responding in exactly the way he wants. The “power of Satan” he is invoking is not a supernatural one but is instead in his ability to use the idea and fear of a Satan to control media narratives the way people used fear of Satan to control him. As in the video, to Lil Nas X, there is no more unseen adversary. Now he is the adversary.
