Episode 221: Satan’s Weird Art History Is Racist As Hell

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• From The Devil In The Mirror, Oma, TST New York, 2021: When Columbus came around to conquer the new world we still had a beast-like representation of evil in European christian culture. Given how the indigenous population was depicted by early explorers, it is easy to draw the parallel between the creation of race and the artistic interpretation of the devil.  As the African population grew in our country to replace the absence of the Taino Indians, the subconscious assertion of supremacy was painted with the similar stroke as before: whiteness was pure, blackness was the devil. In Africa you could literally see a white Jesus fighting a black Satan. This left us with a whitewashed history as a norm. There were some salvaged elements of our African heritage masked as catholic saints; however, this practice of Santeria was deemed “black magic” and “devil worship.” The depiction of the Devil in the Dominican Republic always fascinated me as a child. I was lucky to grow up in an environment which promoted independent thought. My parents did not wish to formally introduce religion in my early life, as they believed it would take away from my childhood. Catholicism ran rampant in our culture, and the perceptions of racial inequality via religious imagery were obvious to those who did not have an obligation to respect it. We were all expected to relate to European culture, and religion. We had to remember that the goal was to be like the conqueror. To that end, there was little to no mention of our African and Taino ancestors had in the development of our diverse culture. This left us with a whitewashed history we embodied as a norm. All of this pushback against my Indigenous and African heritage hit a tipping point for me when I first saw the statue of Columbus in the capital. You can notice Columbus looking forward towards America, exemplifying his grandeur as a Taino Indian writes his name below his feet. This imagery quickly reminded me of how the dark skinned and curly haired Satan was below the feet of St. Michael in religious imagery. When I looked in the mirror as a child, I never saw a Columbus nor a St. Michael; I saw a curly haired and dark skinned little boy. It was the ifrst time I sympathized with the Devil and years later, when I identified as a Satanist, I finally understood why.
• From Revealing The African Presence In Renaissance Europe, Jonathan Spicer, Walter Art Museum, 2013: Night was a fearsome time, especially in the cities, where street lighting was at least a hundred years in the future. Loathsome things took place under cover of darkness: necessary actions such as the removal of sewage and the bodies of plague victims, but also crime, sexual license, and the perversities of witches. Even around 1600, associations of night and the devil remained active, as exemplified by Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night in 1594, in which passages abound as “Night is the devil’s black book wherein he records all our transgressions” and also where the devil “spreads his nets of temptation,” or conventional biblical references as in “As god is entitled the Father of light, so is the devil surnamed the Prince of Darkness, which is the night.” Hell, like Hades, the Greek underworld, was a place of blackness in the bowels of the earth. Satan, the distillation of evil and deceit, was black, as were his demons. The baseness of these beings, fallen from God’s grace and initial whiteness, is expressed in their now blackened state, prompting comparison with the monsters still imagined as possibly inhabiting central Africa. 
  • Black devils in Christian mystery plays of the late Middle Ages, still powerful forms of popular culture in 1500, literally brought these demons to life. It is hardly surprising, then, that in literature across the continent, an uncooperative black slave or Othello himself could be castigated as a “black devil,” or that a Portuguese chronicler, seeing blacks among the Berber captives brought to Portugal in 1441, describes them as “spirits from the lowest hemisphere of Hell.” Sin itself was black, blackening and corrupting the soul by soiling it with a rejection of god. St. Augustine made a comparison between the decisions an individual makes in life and those made by a painter who chooses his colors carefully: “The evil man chooses himself to be a sinner. . .” and “Without question, the sinner has chosen to be the black color.” In a Dutch devotional Picture Handbook from around 1400, “Sin” is personified by a man with multiple heads having the color and features of an African, while “The Seven Deadly Sins”  are imagined as black demons tormenting a young blond woman, a “pure soul.” Besides giving a face to sin, the features of a sub-Saharan African might be adapted to give a face to the Muslim world when demonized as the Saracen enemy, a term made popular by the Crusades, still regarded by European Christians as the fundamental battle of good and evil. Muslims could be any ethnic group, but it might serve political purposes to exaggerate the otherness of Muslims by characterizing them as black Africans. 
• From The Divinisation of Whiteness and Demonisation of Blackness in Renaissance Art, Olivia J. Berry, University of Auckland Auckland, 2023: It became apparent that the iconography of angels has contributed to a phenomenon where whiteness is valued as an emblem of ‘angelic’ qualities. Similarly, popular conceptualisations of the ‘demonic’ have been culturally-engineered despite there being little biblical information about what demons look like. Images of horns, tails, hooves, and black or red skin have amassed a significant semblance of legitimacy as the iconography of everything devilish. This image has also created visual connotations representing black skin as something sinister, dangerous, and cursed: To be non-Christian and sullied by Satan is to be in darkness. In the hands of some Christian writers, the deviancy of ‘darkness’ would come to acquire a polemical association with black skin.” Although the Bible does not provide any physical description of demons, many artists and writers have depended on the Bible’s symbolic language of both blackness/dark and whiteness/light to paint their demonic and angelic characters, respectively.  Specific attention will be paid to the racialised imagery of both angels and demons in paintings of the Last Judgement, as these paintings represent the ultimate moment in which Christian history is at last fulfilled. Several of these images conform to a common pattern of depicting angels using the stencil of a genderless white European, while portraying demons as dark-skinned with animalistic qualities. From medieval times, the myriad of spiritual warfare images in the Last Judgement genre of paintings has provided some form of messaging as to the ranking and value of whiteness and blackness—symbolised and personified by angels and demons themselves. Many pieces of art under this category draw on classical ideas regarding the symbolic function of colour, such as the description of demons offered by the Dutch physician and occultist Johann Weyer: “Deprived as they are of grace, they have hopelessly stained and blackened that essence so that they are now called creatures of the lower atmosphere, full of shadow and darkness.” The immense popularity of Renaissance artwork has carried symbolic colourism into later centuries and supported poorly-evidenced arguments for the divinely-mandated enslavement of Africans. Art brings the viewer into direct contact with the holy, providing the mechanism for epiphany: the epiphany for many European observers was that holiness is expressed through the medium of whiteness as demonstrated by the white exterior of God, Christ, and angels when depicted in art.
• From Exploring Representations of the Black Magus, Shania Johnson, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021: The Adoration of the Magi is the name given to the scene in Christian art following the birth of Jesus in which the three Magi are represented as kings. After following the Star of Bethlehem to find Jesus, they present gifts in recognition of his divinity. Late medieval and early Renaissance depictions of the Adoration show the three kings coming from three different parts of the world: the youngest from Africa, the oldest from East Asia, and a middle-aged king from Europe. Many of these scenes depict the youngest king as a black figure positioned farthest in the composition from Christ. Why is he the youngest? Why is he farthest away? What can these details tell us about European views of black people? While European paintings showed that black people were part of medieval societies, these representations have the potential to shed light on European attitudes toward increasing racial diversity during this period. The 1343 Adoration of the Magi shows three Magi adorned in golden robes, two angels at right standing behind the seated Virgin Mary and infant Christ, and three black attendants presented in the bottom left corner. All except the black figures have golden halos around their heads. The artist creates a clear distinction between those who are considered holy and pure and those who are not. Let’s turn to another adoration scene painted by Justus of Ghent in 1480. There are three black figures in this composition: a king, his servant handing him a gift, and a member of the crowd. The composition follows the common tropes of a black king situated farthest from Christ. 
  • While black people increasingly occupied various roles in medieval society, European views toward people who were neither white nor Christian were rife with discrimination. Despite the presence of black Christians throughout Europe, popular works of art employed a specific vocabulary to distinguish black people from their white Christian counterparts, presenting them without halos and placing them in marginal positions. The circulation of these images, and the messages they contain have undoubtedly shaped (and continue to shape) the way people subconsciously or consciously perceive race today. While scholarship in the field is ongoing, it is helpful to consider documentary records of Africans in Western Europe, as well as medieval texts that provide insight into the perception of race in the Middle Ages. While it may seem anachronistic to use words such as “racism” to describe art in the Middle Ages, it really is not. The works of art in this essay are premodern examples of othering. Recognizing that these forms of racism existed in the past may allow us to expand and reframe contemporary discourse around the legacy of racism. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/exploring-black-magus-in-european-art 
• From Behold the Man, Celeste Carbajal, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 2024: This project aims to unveil and question the representation of race in Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck’s painting entitled “Here Is The Man,” which was made in about 1625-26 during the artist’s trip to Genoa in Italy (1621-27). Why did Van Dyck decide to depict the soldier tormenting Christ just before his crucifixion as a person of colour, especially when other versions of the painting appear to present a white soldier? The painting was probably commissioned by devout Jesuits and powerful merchants and bankers, whose wealth came from the trade of all kinds of goods such as wood, silk, and spices, mostly with the Middle and Far East. Van Dyck arrived at Genoa having already made his name as a renowned artist and with good connections, which allowed him to quickly establish himself as the painter and official portraitist of wealthy families. Genoa was a deeply religious city, with great economic and political power. The city’s splendour developed during the 14th and 15th centuries, with its control of most of the Mediterranean seaports, its political relations with Spain and the so-called ‘discovery’ of America in 1492 by the Genoese Cristobal Columbus, allowing an unprecedented expansion of trade and cultural exchange. ‘Behold the man!’  are the words used by Pontius Pilate when he presented Jesus to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. In this painting, Christ is mockingly being dressed up as King by a Black soldier, with the crown of thorns on his head and a robe around his shoulders. The figure of Pilate has not been included in the composition, making it a more intimate meditative religious object. 
  • The work is not about the narrative per se, but about what the viewer sees, or even more, what the viewer does not see. The treatment of light and colour that highlights the whiteness and paleness of Christ’s body, in contrast with the obscured image of the Black soldier, leads to a meditation on the ethical and moral connotations historically imposed upon notions of light and dark in a way that promotes piety and obedience to the Church. In this way, the painting upholds the relationship between whiteness and power, and reveals some of the parts that religion played in this during the 17th century. It looks like the soldier has a tear dropping from his left eye, but after examining the latest condition assessment report of the painting it appears this is a small splash mark on the varnish. In this period, onversion was a focus for anyone considered to be non-Christian or un-Christian, including rural villagers, women, and North African people, often Muslims. Further afield, the enslaved Africans in the Americas were the focus of Jesuit missionaries. Was the decision to show Christ’s un-Christian, evil tormentor as a Black soldier made to demonstrate the Jesuit mission to convert these groups of people? As such, “Here Is The Man” is an artefact of racial demonisation and exemplifies the interconnected nature of race and religion in Early Modern Europe. When making the contrasts between both figures in the painting so evident, as with Van Dyck’s specific use of light and colour, which reduces the Black soldier to such a problematic moralistic representation, one may ask what are we truly meditating on when viewing this painting? We cannot change the past, but we can change how we look at the past.
• From Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young, Beehive Books, 2021: Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein offers no overt discussions of racial identity for the creature who is assembled from disparate corpses and rebels violently against his maker. But the figure of a Black Frankenstein monster appears with surprising frequency in U.S. culture from the nineteenth century onward, across many media, in direct and indirect references, and in works by African-American as well as white artists. Described as yellow in Shelley’s novel, tinted blue in nineteenth-century stage incarnations, and colored green in twentieth-century cinematic ones, the monster’s color has often signified metaphorically, on the domestic American scene, as Black. The specter of a Black Frankenstein monster — customarily, a male monster — has sometimes been invoked by political conservatives, for whom it reinforces racist connections between blackness and monstrosity. In 1831, Mary Shelley’s novel was republished in a new edition, with a heavily revised text and a new author’s introduction. In America, 1831 was the year of the most famous slave revolt in U.S. history, that of Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia. The Turner revolt prompted debate over emancipation in the Virginia State Legislature, including a defense of slavery by a politician named Thomas Dew. A pro-slavery apologist, Dew wrote: “To turn the negro loose would be to raise up a creature resembling the fiction of a recent romance; the hero of which constructs a human form with all the physical capabilities of man but finds too late that he has only created a power of mischief, and himself recoils from the monster which he has made.” Dew was quoting a British politician, George Canning, who had spoken in an 1824 debate in British Parliament against emancipating West Indian slaves; his reference was most likely to the stage version of Frankenstein then popular in London. Canning used the Frankenstein story to represent the enslaved West Indian man as an irrational child who should not be freed. In quoting Canning, Thomas Dew reinforced his pro-slavery conservatism, bringing together West Indian with North American slavery. 
  • The figure of a Black Frankenstein monster appears in subsequent decades in political cartoons, oratory, poetry, and fiction, but the most famous transformation of the Frankenstein story came exactly a century later, with James Whale’s films Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Whale’s Frankenstein focuses on the monster’s creation, his inadvertent murder of a child, and his apparent death in a fire. There are no visible African-American characters in the Whale films, but the films indirectly offer a radical intervention into American iconographies of race, rape, and lynching, offering an antilynching perspective. In both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein the monster is depicted in flight from a crowd of angry townspeople, whose pursuit of him is represented with the visual markers of a lynch mob, including barking dogs, fiery torches, and angry cries. At one point in Bride of Frankenstein, the monster is strung up on a tree as a cluster of white people surrounds him, their anger sparked by his perceived attack on a white girl. The monster is presented sympathetically at this moment, his iconography blended with that of Christian martyrdom. The metaphorical blackness of the Frankenstein monster in the Whale films is made literal in Blackenstein, a film in the 1970s genre of blaxploitation which records the transformation of a young African-American soldier who has lost his limbs in Vietnam. After an operation in a V.A. hospital, Turner reemerges as a monster whose large form and lumbering gait offer an affectionate parody of Boris Karloff ’s Frankenstein monster. The film’s pointed references to the Vietnam War suggest that this individual act is also a national allegory. In a world in which the perception of Black monstrosity continues to have literally murderous effects, a third century of Frankenstein stories prompts an ever-undead metaphor, and writers and artists remain vital to showing how Black lives as well as monsters matter. https://beehivebooks.medium.com/black-frankenstein-85f8a49fa1ba 
• From The White Man Jesus, Edward Blum, Aeon Magazine, 2013: Americans care deeply about how biblical figures are represented in the flesh. Whether discussing the darkness of Satan or the‘sexy whiteness of Jesus, the ethnic ‘look’ of the characters has been just as important (if not more so) than what they have said or done. In previous decades, people asked Martin Luther King Jr what Jesus looked like, and during the 1920s, Americans debated whether it was appropriate to show Jesus in films. In the Bible itself, bodies matter, but not the way they do now: The ancient texts have sick bodies and healed bodies, pierced bodies and resurrected bodies, but for the most part, the Bible is pretty quiet about the colour of those bodies’ skin or the tone of their hair. To understand our contemporary obsession, consider colonial New England, where Puritans differentiated themselves from Catholics by refusing to display Jesus, god, or the Madonna in their churches or on printed materials. Puritans were not absolute in their iconoclasm: but they were fine with other representations, and Satan was sometimes represented as an emaciated dark figure. The lack of biblical detail about Christ’s physical features was crucial to the universal appeal of Christianity: “If He were particularised and localised — if, for example, he were made a man with a pale face — then the man with a darker face would feel that there was a greater distance between Christ and himself,” one presbyterian minister cautioned in 1880.  In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr’s advice column in Ebony magazine received a letter that asked: ‘Why did god make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?’ ‘The colour of Jesus’ skin is of little or no consequence,’ King reassured his readers, because skin colour ‘is a biological quality which has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the personality’. Jesus transcended race, but in a society that separated people based on colour, god’s son wasn’t the only challenge for image-makers: the devil was, too. 
  • During the Civil War, one northern African-American, T Morris Chester, had announced that just as it was time for slavery to end, it was also time for women and men of colour to refuse the language and images that associated darkness with evil and whiteness with good. Chester asked his fellows to wield consumer power to effect change. If, he said, you “want a scene from the Bible, and this cloven-footed personage is painted black, say to the vendor that your scruples will not permit you to support so gross a misrepresentation, and when the creator and his angels are presented as white, tell him that you would be guilty of sacrilege if you accepted it.” By refusing the idea of the dark devil, Chester was going up against centuries of Christian iconography. Throughout medieval Europe, it was entirely regular to describe Satan as dark or black. Witches were known for practising ‘dark arts’, and in early colonial America when British immigrants to the New World accused others of being witches, they too conflated darkness with the demonic. The devil was everywhere in Salem in 1692, and he could take any number of physical forms: He did not always come in blackness or redness but most often he did, and the devil came as a Jew and as a Native American as well. The Puritan theologian Cotton Mather associated Indians and black people with the devil and wrote that ‘Swarthy Indians’ were often in the company of ‘Sooty Devils.’ Because of America’s history and its contemporary demographics, there is almost no way to depict Bible characters without causing alarm: To call Jesus ‘black’ signals political values that are associated with the radical left, and to present Jesus as white is quickly understood as a code for a conservative worldview. Little wonder, then, that some Americans are choosing to describe Jesus as ‘brown’ as a way to avoid the white-black binary. https://aeon.co/essays/was-jesus-a-white-man-and-the-devil-black 
• From The Devil Rides Out, Dennis Wheatley, 1932: “Let’s not talk of Black Magic, which is associated with the preposterous in our day, but of the order of the Left Hand Path. That, too, has its adepts and, just as the Yoga of Tibet are the preservers of the Way of Light, the Way of Darkness is exemplified in the horrible Voodoo cult which had its origin in Madagascar and has held Africa in its grip for centuries, spreading even with the slave trade to the West Indies and your own country.” “Yes, I know quite a piece about that, the Negroes monkey with it still back home in the Southern States, despite their apparent Christianity. Still I can’t think that an educated man would take serious notice of that Mumbo Jumbo stuff.” “Not in its crude form perhaps, but others have cultivated the power of Evil, and among whites it is generally the wealthy and intellectual, who are avaricious for greater riches or power, to whom it appeals.The Malgasy are a strange people: Half-Negro and half-Polynesian. A great migration took place many centuries ago from the South Seas to the East African Coast. Most of them settled in Madagascar, where they intermarried with the aborigines and produced this half-breed type, which often has the worst characteristics of both races. And Madagascar is the home of Voodoo and Witch Doctors. I’ve read someplace that such fellows have no power over whites, and surely that is so, else how could settlers in Africa and places keep the blacks under? What we call Magic is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. Very few white men can really get inside a Negro’s mind and know exactly what he is thinking, and even fewer blacks can appreciate a white’s mentality. In consequence, it is infinitely harder for the Wills of either race to work on the other than on men of their own kind. Another factor which adds to the difficulty of a Negroid or Mongolian Sorcerer working his spells upon a European is the question of vibrations: Variation in human beings is governed largely by the part of the earth’s surface in which birth took place. Some races have long wavelengths and others shorter, and the greater the varіation the more difficult it is for a malignant will to influence that of an intended victim. Were it otherwise, you may be certain that the white races, who have neglected spiritual growth for material achievement, would never have come to dominate the world as they do today.”
• From The Republican Devil, Steve Erickson, American Prospect, 2013: In the Bible, the Devil doesn’t show up until relatively late. Over the millennia, as Christians have revised Jesus himself, the Devil has become more charismatic as well. The Devil in some ways has been more subject to interpretation than Jesus. Sometimes he’s an abstraction who’s more chaos than evil, sometimes he’s a seducer and con man, sometimes he’s a fallen angel pitted against a god to whom he’s close to equal. The hooded figure slogging through the Moroccan sands in the History Channel’s recent miniseries The Bible looks rather like President Obama. The Bible‘s producers (one of whom was the star of Touched By An Angel a decade ago) insist the resemblance is entirely coincidental; out of all the actors in all the gin joints in all the world who might have played the part, apparently this one was chosen because it’s a role with which he’s familiar, having played it in the past, though this seems a peculiar sort of type casting. On the other hand, Obama also has been cast before in this part by sectors of the American public when they’re not depicting him as Hitler, a foreign-born Other, or the leading figure in an End Days scenarios. The resemblance on the show was first noted not by paranoid leftists but TV’s Glenn Beck, who makes a point of not voicing the president’s name, in the manner of Hogwarts wizards who won’t speak Voldemort’s. Other professional blabbermouths of the right have said that while the producers didn’t mean to make Satan look like Obama, god guided the hand of the series’ makeup artist and blinded everyone else on the set while they were shooting. Christians have a love-hate relationship with Satan: They would be nowhere without him, and the more god-fearing that one is, the more useful the Devil becomes, until a point is reached when the Devil becomes more useful than god. That is the point where part of the American body politic has been for the past four years, as association with Obama is so all-encompassingly dreadful that some will reverse positions they’ve held for years, even opposing bills with their own names on them, to avoid the sulfuric whiff of presidential support. When a church’s devil comes to mean more than its god (whether that church is political or spiritual), its animating spirit metastasizes and dies, the quest no longer about transcendence but only deliverance.
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