Heather Freeman: Hey, it’s Heather. Just a note before we start the show — this episode includes frank conversations about sex and sex-positivity. It’s recommended for mature listeners. Thanks!  

Heather: I'm surfing the web, looking for old news videos about a particular pair of shoes. They're black Nike Air Max 97s. A bronze, inverted pentagram hangs from the tongue. The Bible verse Luke 10:18 is painted on the side in red. And the soles contain one drop of human blood. 

There are 666 pairs of them in the world. They’re Satan Shoes.

The rapper Lil Nas X collaborated with the art collective MSCHF to create them and they were released in tandem with his hit music video MONTERO (call me by your name). Lil Nas X is a hip-hop and rap pioneer for a lot of reasons. One of them is for coming out as gay when that was taboo in many ways.

Since then, he's leaned in to being out in his creative projects and online. Here’s Lil Nas X from his 2021 MONTERO music video.

Lil Nas X: In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don't want the world to see. But here, we don't. Welcome to Montero. 

Heather: In the MONTERO music video,  Lil Nas X slides down a stripper pole into Hell, gives Satan a lap dance, and then kills the Prince of Hell to become its new reigning sovereign. 

And while some fans loved this, others were really upset.

Pastor Greg Locke: A bunch of devil-worshiping wicked nonsense, pentagram wearing on your Nike tennis shoes, 666 —you think I'm gonna stand for that, you've lost your mind! 

DopePastor: We will not accept devil worshiping music. This is the prime example of selling your soul to the devil.

Heather: After the video came out in March 2021, Lil Nas X and his Satanic shoes set off a firestorm that consumed the headlines on social media for a few weeks. Some sneaker influencers even threw away their $1,018 pair of Satan Shoes because they were worried about offending religiously and socially conservative audience members. 

Meanwhile, Lil Nas X defended his creative choices. 

Lil Nas X: People already demonize who I am and, okay, he's evil, he's doing this, he's doing that. So it's like, you know what? I'll be that and i'm going to make the best of it. 

Heather: And then the courts got involved. Nike sued MSCHF – the collective that made the shoes – for trademark infringement. And then that was all over the news. 

Jeanne Moos (CNN): Now Nike is suing, saying it confused consumers into believing Nike is endorsing Satanism, when Nike did not design or release these shoes. 

Heather: Nike and MSCHF settled in April, 2021. And MSCHF agreed to refund all shoes purchased. 

But the 666 pairs are still in demand. Last I looked on eBay, apparently, my size goes for almost $10,000. Bummer. 

After all this blew up, Lil Nas stated that he wasn’t actually a Satanist and the social media brouhaha eventually settled down. But it never really resolved.

If Lil Nas X wasn't a Satanist, why did he use such explicit satanic imagery? And why is that imagery so triggering anyway?

Dr. Cimminnee Holt: Lil Nas X is a perfect example, that he's very prominent and he's there, and he's using Satan in a very particular way. 

Heather: Dr. Cimminnee Holt teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. She explained to me how pop culture Satanism and religious Satanism inform one another. And always have.

Cimminnee: You can trace perceptions of Satan in all different ways. And most of where they draw from is popular culture. From television shows, from books, from TV, from religious texts, and putting together in a hodgepodge of evolving religious ideas that are considered occult. 

Heather: Popular media has inspired religious Satanism. And at the same time, popular fears about devil worship and infernal rituals have led to moral panics targeting innocent individuals – including innocent Satanists.

I'm Heather Freeman and this is Magic in the United States. 

In today's episode, Satan Shoes, we'll learn about Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. We’ll also talk about how Satanism has blossomed into a broad and diverse category today -- from the atheistic and material to the theistic and esoteric. We'll also break down how moral panics have been a part of American history for generations. And will likely stay with us until – well, Hell freezes over. 

We'll be right back.

 (BREAK) 

Heather: This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

Anton LaVey was the founder of the Church of Satan. And his early life is a little shrouded in mystery. But here's what we know. 

Dr. Ethan Doyle White: We know that Anton Szandor LaVey was actually born Howard Stanton Levy in Chicago in 1930, to a family whose heritage seems to have been a mix of sort of Ukrainian, Russian, and German. 

Heather: Dr. Ethan Doyle White is a historian, scholar of religious studies, and teaches at City Lit in London.

Ethan: He maintained that he had no real childhood religion, but he certainly developed an antipathy towards organized Christianity. 

Heather: Anton LaVey probably developed his interest in the weird and esoteric early in life. And that wasn't easy in socially conservative post-war America. According to his biography, his first jobs were also weird and esoteric compared to the status quo of the 1940s and 50s. 

Cimminnee: He makes his way, he's sort of a vagabond, and claimed to have trained big cats in traveling circuses and carnivals. 

Heather: Dr. Cimminnee Holt again. 

Cimminnee: He was very much into music. He would play music at sometimes the Saturday night nudie shows, after a carnival. He would also then play music at a church the next morning and see the same gentleman, sort of signaling that mankind has this tension when they engage in sexuality. 

Heather: Although he was born in Chicago, LaVey grew up in San Francisco, and later inherited his childhood home from his parents. 

Anton LaVey was interested in theater and mythology, and his own life was a stage. As you’ll hear, Anton had a penchant for the dramatic, so many details in his authorized biography were probably fabricated — or at least exaggerated — to enhance the thrills and chills of his life. Like this one: 

LaVey claimed he was a photographer for the San Francisco Police Department when he was in his 20s. And when someone called the department to complain about a ghost, the police would refer LaVey. 

LaVey would approach his work in a very matter-of-fact way.

Cimminnee: He would go to someone's home and investigate in their attic and he would see a board is creaking with the wind and say, ‘You don't have a ghost.’ And he noted how people would look disappointed. And that disappointment demonstrated to him that people like to have a little bit of titillation and theater. 

Heather: That lesson about human nature stuck with LaVey. And as we’ll see, he incorporated creative embellishments into the public displays of his life - for dramatic effect. 

For LaVey, the objective reality of anything supernatural was less important than the psychological impact of the exciting and frightening: There was power in the dramatic. 

By the 1950s, he was holding Friday night occult discussions with a group of friends, dubbed The Magic Circle. 

Cimminnee: He liked to gather them together, and they would have discussions about world events, philosophy, religion. He was interested in these different people And he liked to seat maybe an army general next to a drag queen or something like that.

And at some point in these discussions of this Magic Circle that would happen, someone suggested to him that he had enough for his own religion. And that's when he began to sort of think about forming the Church of Satan.

Heather: Let's take a minute and unpack the word ‘Satan.’ Because we might think we know the Devil, Lucifer, or the Man in Black, but the idea of Satan has been evolving for at least two millennia.

Ethan Doyle White again.

Ethan: Satan is, of coursem a figure drawn primarily from Christian mythology. References are occasional and not always very clear.

Heather: One of the earliest references to what we would today call Satan is Ha-Satan, who appears in the Hebrew Bible in the Book of Job. Cimminnee Holt.

Cimminnee: Job is an incredibly pious man living his life. And, this character, Ha-Satan, which translates to “the opposer”, seems to be a messenger of God. He sits on God's court. 

God says, ‘Oh, have you seen my servant Job?’ Like, look how pious he is. And Ha-Satan says, ‘Well, I mean, you've given him everything. Of course he's pious.’ But Ha-Satan, this character, the opposer, and God make a bet. 

And God says, ‘Yeah, you can mess up his life, and then we'll see if he's still pious.’ So, Ha-Satan, the opposer, says, ‘Great!’ And, you know, afflicts him with disease. He loses all his livestock. Some of his family dies. Like, his life is decimated. It's terrible. 

Heather: God and Ha-Satan watch to see what happens, and eventually Job gets his redemption. But this is just one of the earliest examples of what later became Satan. 

And Satan evolves a lot over the centuries. 

Ethan: By the 3rd or 4th century, Christian communities had constructed a biography of Satan. He was seen as one of God's angels who rebelled and led a rebellion of other angels. Those rebellious angels were in turn cast out of Heaven, with Satan becoming a sort of nefarious figure who was intent on dragging as many souls as possible down to Hell.

Cimminnee: Christian theologians retroactively pick out every character in these texts that somehow opposed God and say ‘These were all Satan.’ So, Satan then becomes a first name, and a proper noun, and characteristics that absorb all of these notions of evil. 

Heather: Then the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries introduced new ways of thinking, where logical reasoning became the defining feature of philosophy, politics, economics, and the arts.

Cimminnee: Then in the Enlightenment, thinkers and philosophers start challenging the nature of reality itself by challenging the existence of God. 

Ethan: And counter-cultural figures, particularly from the 19th century onward, actually embraced Satan as a positive figure, as a figure of resistance and of rebellion to unjust authority, because he was the villain of Christian mythology. 

Cimminnee: Some of these thinkers and philosophers, start to depict Satan in far more favorable terms. Here is someone who is beautiful, who is challenging the status quo. And they take it as a symbol for themselves as well, but not in a religious sense, but more as a rhetorical tool. 

And some of the Enlightenment depictions of Satan, become seductive. Satan becomes the anti-hero, the rebel hero, the underdog that people root for. 

Heather: The idea of worshiping Satan as a religious figure emerged in Europe in the late 19th century. But this existed more in fiction than in fact. 

It was these enlightenment ideas of Satan that inspired Anton LaVey. 

Cimminnee: LaVey folds this into his worldview, that the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, of critical inquiry, of the scientific method, that these are interesting things in which to flex your intellect. And it is Satanic to pursue these things, especially if they tend to go against the status quo or challenge homogenous society. 

Heather: For LaVey, that homogenous society was most evident in the Protestant Christian ethics of 1950s America. 

Cimminnee: He views this conservative, ambient, Protestant Christianity in America as a very oppressive thing, especially when it comes to sexuality, but even other ideas.

Heather: LaVey’s Magic Circle began meeting in the 1950s and by the time he formed the Church of Satan, the counterculture movements of the 1960s ruled the headlines. These social movements ranged from Vietnam War protests, to LSD advocacy, and they included sexual liberation. Status quo ideas about sexuality and sinfulness were being challenged. Bodily autonomy and the celebration of physical pleasure were new and revolutionary ideas for many Americans. 

LaVey was also interested in celebrating the body, sensuality, and sexuality, things that were historically viewed by many Christian denominations as sinful.

Cimminnee: Protestant Christianity understood itself as being of the mind of the spirit, not you know, embodied. There's sort of this cleavage between these two things. And LaVey didn't see these things as separate. You are housed in your body. You are a body. He's making a deliberate choice here when he centers the self and that bodily experience in his religion.

Heather: In many ways, Anton LaVey took Satan as a symbol and flipped it on its head.

Cimminnee: He began to view the figure of Satan as then this imposed moniker on people and things and ideas that are challenging the status quo. So to him this is a fantastic symbol, a symbol that he would adopt for himself and the symbol of his Church. 

And so he begins to sort of form this concept of the Church of Satan and that it would represent a kind of enlightenment you know, people and things and ideas that were deliberately being provocative.

If you can get past an initial reaction, if you understand the humor behind it, then that was sort of step one, that you didn't see the word or hear the word and automatically think ‘Satan’ and ‘Evil’. So to him, this was centered, it is deliberate, that people are going to have a reaction. 

Heather: The Church of Satan was officially founded on April 30th, 1966 in San Francisco. And the Church maintained nine Satanic tenets.

Ethan: LaVey wanted to emphasize that his followers should be an elite of sorts and set themselves apart from what he regarded as the herd of ordinary humanity. His followers should be intelligent, they should be creative, they should be curious, they should be non-conformist, pursuing what they wanted to pursue, regardless of what other people thought.

It was very influenced by the writings of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand. Broadly speaking, LaVey's philosophy was essentially a form of right-wing libertarianism. 

Heather: LaVeyan Satanism was also atheistic, meaning, as far as we know, he didn't believe in a literal Satan who heard his prayers or witnessed his rituals.

Cimminnee: It is fair to say that he is an atheist, I think, although he didn't necessarily use that particular term. He just rejected theism, rejected the idea of spirituality. He thinks that all Gods and devils and religions and spirits are an extension of mankind, as part of our emotional and psychological lives.

Ethan: LaVey instead presented Satan as a symbol of humanity's intrinsically carnal animal nature. He thought people should embrace that aspect of themselves. 

Heather: After the break, we'll learn more about the Church of Satan and the Satanic Panic that almost drove it completely underground.

We'll be right back. 

 (BREAK) 

Heather: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

Anton LaVey was interested in Satan as a provocative symbol. He was also interested in the theatrical, as a way of shaking up people's assumptions about the world. 

And in the groovy 1960s age of social protest and counter-culture activism, the media was already primed for the scandalous and bizarre.

Ethan Doyle White.

Ethan: LaVey loved the media, I think it's fair to say. He very much dressed the part of the Pope of Satan. He had this shaved head, he went around wearing all black, sometimes in a cape, sometimes even wearing devil horns. And he knew how to manipulate the media to ensure he got maximum publicity.

This included trying to get Hollywood celebrities to come and have photos taken with him, most famously Jane Mansfield in the 1960s and then Sammy Davis Jr. in the early 1970s, and actually many decades later Marilyn Manson. 

Heather: And it wasn't just surrounding himself with celebrities. Anton LaVey staged rituals that even for the 1960s were risque. Cimminnee Holt.

Cimminnee: He would have a nude woman lying on an altar, and he would perform the rituals for these cameras. Most of the media that covered those events were gentleman's magazines, so we can call them, but eventually some more reputable newspapers and magazines cover them. 

Heather:  LaVey performed all sorts of rituals for the media, from Satanic weddings and funerals, to even a ‘topless witches review’ at a nightclub. But all this media attention? It was there to get new members for the Church of Satan. 

In 1969, LaVey published The Satanic Bible, which spread his message even further.

Cimminnee: In the Satanic Bible, it outlines the main ideas. And what is fairly unique from a lot of other religious texts is that the Bible itself is not considered sacred because they don't believe in a cleavage between the sacred and the mundane. You know, it's all profane. It's all mundane. 

So the text outlines ideas. And the first one is that it's a religion of the individual focused on the individual and what the individual wants, and that the symbol for the self is Satan.

The inherent Satanic thing in your life is to discover what you want in life and to actively pursue it, to not be passive in your own life. You can't blame a god or a devil for what happens to you. When things happen, you still have control over your reaction. 

Heather: This focus on individual agency included sex and Anton LaVey was pretty progressive for his time. 

Cimminnee: From the very beginning, LaVey had an understanding that sexuality was a complex and varied thing, some people's tendencies could be orgies and parties with multiple partners, and that some people were asexual. 

He is fully accepting of the LGBTQ spectrum, including trans identity. In fact, he spoke fondly of the idea of display and shifting your gender as a magical act. 

Heather: But The Satanic Bible isn't without its own ethical guidelines. There were definitely clear boundaries.

Cimminnee: In his list of things not to do, he does say, no sex with children, you know, no rape, no sex with animals. So he's very clear to have these lines, but anything between, alive, consenting adults is fine. 

Heather: While the first half of The Satanic Bible outlines philosophies and ideas, the second half prescribes magical rituals. 

In Season 2, Episode 3 #GoodVibesOnly, we talk about New Thought and the idea of mind over matter as a way of claiming some kind of agency in a chaotic world. 

In The Satanic Bible, the focus is almost entirely on taking intensely emotional states and expressing them physically through ritual. 

Cimminnee: His idea is if you spend all your life repressing your emotions, you're a ticking time bomb. So he constructs these rituals that are focused on stimulating your senses and having bodily experience within this ritual. 

Heather: The Satanic Bible gives three rituals: the Lust Ritual, the Compassion Ritual, and the Destruction Ritual. The practitioner uses all five senses – sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound – to have a physical experience of an emotional state, such as desire, grief, or anger. 

The idea is that by doing this, the practitioner can gain psychological mastery over an emotional state, diffusing this ticking time bomb. 

Cimminnee gives an example by describing a version of the Lust Ritual.

Cimminnee: You would gather images and scent and things of someone that you desired. You would invoke Satan, or the names of Satan, or different demons. The apex of the ritual is that you would then masturbate to orgasm. And the idea is, you are indulging in this desire in this safe space, and it frees you afterwards, to behave a bit more with more control towards this person. Now it can be done to get a lover, but then people have told me throughout the years sometimes they did it because they had attraction to someone that was inappropriate and maybe performing this ritual was a way to just get over that feeling.

Heather: Does the performance of these rituals enact magical change in the world around you? Or is it psychological change within your own mind? It sort of depends on your interpretation. Ethan explains.

Ethan: There was a strong element of self-transformation in these rites, that what you were doing was there to affect your own psychology.

Now, this is actually quite a typical approach of the 1960s and it reflects the way in which Occultism was having to deal with the way that psychology and science had come to be so widely embraced as explanations of the world. So rather than having rituals literally invoking real spirits, what these rituals were doing was explicitly having a psychological impact on their participants and that was the actual purpose. 

Heather: While Anton LaVey framed these rituals as psychological, he also framed them within the context of Western ceremonial magic. 

And remember that right-wing, libertarian angle to his beliefs? Well, that comes up in how he discusses what makes for successful or unsuccessful magic.

Cimminnee: So there's a job that you want, you're going to go into that interview dressed to impress. You're going to speak a particular way. You're going to make eye contact. But to him, this is magic. You are a successful magician when you're manipulating people. And real successful magic is when the person does not feel manipulated. If the person feels taken advantage of or manipulated, that makes you the bad magician. It's about having a seamless interaction with people, where you're still achieving your goals and getting what you want out of life, and all of that is magic. 

Heather: The Church of Satan quickly spread, and they called their churches ‘grottoes’. By 1971, there were a dozen grottoes and several thousand members around the world. But as the Church got bigger, discontent began to percolate inside the Church. 

Ethan: Often the grotto leaders wanted to deviate from LaVey's teachings in one way or another. And LaVey didn't like this very much. The big change, the big shift, comes in 1975. LeVey declares that any further advancement within the Church can be bought through donations of money, or through real estate, or things like this. And that really angered a lot of other senior church members. 

Heather: Some of these senior church members split off and formed their own organizations, inspired by the church of Satan, but unique in their own ways. LaVey began excommunicating Church leaders through the early 1970s and eventually abolished the grotto system entirely.

While the Church of Satan was fracturing on the inside, a national moral panic was growing on the outside. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s was focused on the idea that secret Satanic groups were abusing children. Several social trends came together in the 1970s to prime the U.S. for a moral panic.

Ethan: Now the idea of secret Satanic groups had been around in literature since at least the late 19th century, but it became especially widespread in the late 1960s and 1970s, including in cinema, notably, the 1969 film Rosemary's Baby. 

Heather: So the idea of Satanic conspiracy wasn't new. But a number of factors overlapped to create this particular moral panic.

Ethan: In the 1970s, you'd had second-wave feminism become a prominent influence, raising attention to the fact that domestic abuse, including the abuse of children, was a widespread problem, something that had previously been largely overlooked and ignored.

You also had an increasingly assertive Christian right in the United States, one which typically believed that Satan was a very real force active on the earth, and who had to be combated. 

Heather: The Christian right and second-wave feminists might not seem like obvious political bedfellows. 

But concern about the abuse of children – an issue raised primarily by feminist movements – overlapped with conservative Christian unease over the New Religious Movements of the 1960s, which included everything from Hare Krishnas, to Neo-Pagans, to the Church of Satan. 

So both Christian and secular groups joined efforts in the anti-cult movements of the 1970s. And once a moral panic gets started, it generates its own fuel to keep growing.

Ethan: Linked to this, you'd had a growing number of people who essentially called themselves ex-Satanists, but that they had renounced and embraced some form of Christianity. Now in most cases, these ex-Satanist narratives were entirely fictitious, but nevertheless they were an influence throughout the 1970s and, of course, they had an influence on popular culture. So you have a wide range of influences, some from the political left, some from the political right, some basically apolitical, that would provide the ultimate basis from which the Satanic Panic could emerge in about 1980.

Heather: The book Michelle Remembers. The McMartin preschool trials. The trials of the West Memphis Three. These cases were synonymous with Satanic ritual abuse and murder in popular American media. And all of them were ultimately proven false. 

But this national frenzy led to arrests and criminal charges against innocent people, including both Satanists and members of other marginalized religions. Innocent individuals spent time in prison and lost decades of their lives under the weight of false accusations of ritual abuse and murder. 

While Anton LaVey wasn't targeted by accusations of ritual, Satanic child abuse, other Church of Satan members were, who were later proved innocent as well.

In Season 1 Episode 2, Ancient Technopagans, we talked about how many Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, and other religious minorities had to suppress their religious identities at this time, lest they get swept up in the hysteria as well. 

Ethan: Many people didn't have sufficient knowledge to differentiate Satanists from other forms of Occultists such as Wiccans. Both Wiccans and Satanists draw upon the same traditional storehouse of imagery such as the pentagram. So it became very easy for many people to assume that Wiccans and Satanists were the same thing.

But also people who were into heavy metal and hard rock, people who were goths, people who were interested in Dungeons & Dragons, were also being caught up in these accusations because the aesthetic that they embraced was something that many people associated with stereotypes of Satanism. 

Heather: Like other moral panics throughout history, the Satanic Panic also eventually died out. But it never completely went away.

Ethan: It reached its widest level of influence in the late 1980s and early 1990s before it ultimately died out, in part because there was growing skepticism among influential areas of society, but also because several thorough investigations by law enforcement had come to the conclusion that there was no conspiracy.

But the idea of a Satanic conspiracy engaged in widespread abuses has never completely gone away. The believers have continued to believe and ultimately you've seen it regroup in new variants, most famously the QAnon conspiracy theory that we've seen in the last ten years or so. 

Heather: The Church of Satan survived the Satanic Panics. And LaVey passed away in 1997. 

Like any religion, LeVayan Satanists practicing today are diverse. 

Tyler McKenzie identifies as a Satanist, but that's just one part of his larger spiritual and religious identity. In other episodes, we've met individuals who grew up in one religion and then came to another practice later in life. And this is true for Tyler too. But he grew up around a lot of religious diversity.

Tyler: Well, in my family we have Mormons, we have Jews, we have Christians as well as a few Atheists sprinkled here and there. You had the Mormons saying theirs is the right way and the Jehovah's Witnesses saying theirs, and then the Atheists is, ‘Ah, none of it's right.’ So, it was very humbling because I got to see so many different views. 

Heather: So as a teenager, Tyler explored many different religions and philosophies.

Tyler: There was friends in my life that were into witchcraft and Luciferianism and Paganism and all these different other religions and I was curious.

Heather: Luciferianism, by the way, is similar to Satanism, and there's a lot of overlap. But Luciferians focus on Lucifer, the Light Bringer, instead of Satan, the Opposer. 

Tyler: One of my friends had a Satanic Bible, and what I've been taught in church is, it's good to have a double-edged sword, it's good to know your enemy. And if Satan is my enemy, then I should know him. Well, what better to know him than this book right here, The Satanic Bible?

Heather: So Tyler borrowed the book from his friend and read it. While he didn't agree with everything in it, he also didn't find it particularly negative either. And some of LaVey's ideas really resonated.

Tyler: Satanism, is an idea of individuality. And I believe, even as a Christian, they should be individuals, as any person, be an individual, be yourself, don't let someone tell you how to live your life because then you'll never live a fulfilled life.

Quoting, page 40 in The Satanic Bible, “It is a popular misconception that the Satanist does not believe in God. The concept of God, as interpreted by man, has been so varied throughout the ages that the Satanist simply accepts the definition which suits him best.” 

Heather: Part of the individualism of Satanism is that you pursue your own truths in your own way. 

Today, Tyler identifies as omnist/deist. An omnist respects and believes in all religions. A deist believes in God. But by mixing the two ideas, he also denies no religion. That is, Tyler practices many different religions and harmonizes them through that practice. 

But he’s experienced discrimination, at times specifically targeting his Satanic beliefs.

Tyler: When I started getting into Satanism and other stuff, that opened up a lot more cans of worms because here they are, hating on me and shaming me and belittling me for being a Satanist. 

It was always confusing to me. And, sometimes that confusion can make you want to even shame yourself. You're trying to understand the people around you and you can't. So then you start thinking about, ‘Well, how intelligent am I really? How logical and reasonable is my views?’ 

And I think that one of the worst ones is not always even the shame and belittling we get from the people from the outside, but what we give to ourself, having to suffer those outside attacks.

Heather: Satan started out as the Great Opposer, and today the symbol of Satan is still a powerful image of defiance.

So whether or not Lil Nas X identifies as a Satanist is kind of beside the point. 

Remember how Anton LaVey thought that real magic is getting people to do things or think about things without realizing that they're being … well, 'magicked' into it? 

That’s kind of what Lil Nas X did. In just one viral music video, he challenged his audiences to question their comfort zones, to think about the things that might make them nervous – and brought light to the darkness.  

He was being an opposer to the status quo. 

And in that way, Lil Nas X is an exceptional magician. 

Lil Nas X: There's still parts of myself that I am learning to accept.  But we're getting closer. 

* * *

Heather: We hope you enjoyed season two of Magic in the United States, and that it sparked your curiosity to learn more about the religious, spiritual, and magical histories of this amazing country. Give us a rating and leave a review. We'd appreciate it! 

Do you have an idea for an episode of magic in the United States? Or are you a practitioner of magic, healing, or participate in a marginalized religion, or folk spirituality? We'd love to hear about it. Give us a ring and leave a voice memo at 9 8 0 2 7 7 4 4 0 2. Or write us at magicintheunitedstates@gmail.com. We might include your story in a future episode. 

And there's more American magic than you can shake a broom at. So we'll be back in October with more stories of the occult, the esoteric, the mysterious, and the maligned, and the amazing practitioners who walk these crossroads in Season 3. 

Thorn Mooney: Magic is tricky. I think there's a tendency to think of magic as sort of this mediator between science and religion. Like, magic is the stuff that goes in the middle.

Cory Hutcheson: Things like Pentecostalism — they bring a whole new way of experiencing mystical Christianity. So you have gifts of the spirit, so speaking in tongues.

Elizabeth Tucker: I learned about Johnny Appleseed in elementary school, going from town to town with his pockets full of apple seeds and making everybody happy. Nobody talked about him being a Swedenborgian who had spirit wives.  

Sean McCloud: Mahayana Buddhist meditation plays a major role in the 60s and 70s, often by practicing convert Buddhists.

Shannon Taggart: You know, these women were pioneers. They were spiritualist mediums saying that the spirits were helping them do this art and they predate Kandinsky. It's really blowing up in the art world. 

 Cimminnee Holt: People are assembling, they're engaging in new ideas, some of them relate to the occult, some of them relate to Eastern philosophy and religion. But they're trying things out.

Abel Gomez: And so it's different when someone is becoming a kind of spiritual tourist, when these practices and traditions have deeply rooted cultural meanings and values. 

Silver Daniels: It's ultimately a tradition about becoming your best self, as cliché as that sounds.  Because, as an initiate, you are their avatar. So they want to make sure they look good, you know?

Heather: Tune in October. Wherever you get your podcasts. 

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our Associate Producer is Noor Gill, and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Dania Suleman. The Executive Producer for PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. The show’s music is from APM Music and Epidemic Sound, and our project managers are Edwin Ochoa and Morgan Church. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

Thanks to guests Cimminnee Holt, Tyler McKenzie, and Ethan Doyle White. Thanks to episode advisors Daniel Harms, Cory Hutchison, Sean McCloud, and Sabina Magliocco along with the other Humanities Advisors: Helen Berger, Danielle Boaz, Yvonne Chireau, Chas Clifton, Abel Gomez, Thorn Mooney, and Meg Whalen. Finally a big thank you to the families, friends, and colleagues of the entire production team, and for your support throughout this project — this includes Swazi the Cat and all our foster dogs and foster kittens. 

Wherever you are in the United States — the east, the west, the north, or the south — magic is everywhere.

I'm Heather Freeman. And I'll see you in October for season three, right here at the crossroads.

Additional audio clips from:

YouTube:
COMPLEX. “Lil Nas X Shows Off His "Satan Shoe", Self-Lacing Sneakers, and Current Rotation.” (29 March, 2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueQZv6N6XKk
HBO. “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero | Official Trailer | HBO.” (2024) "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dzoB-tC8Bo

CNN.com:
Moos, Jeanne. “Lil Nas X's shoes sell out instantly for over $1K per pair” (2021) https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/03/29/satan-shoes-lil-nas-moos-vpx.cnn (Includes excerpts from MONTERO (call me by your name) music video.)

TikTok:
DopePastor (TikTok) https://www.tiktok.com/@dopepastor/video/6945478147303361798