“When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.”
“And why call all this Satanic?” I asked. “Why not call it chaos? That is all it would be.”
“Because,” she said, “that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn’t they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.”
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“Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic,” she said. “Or what we would call, in our colossal egotism and sentimentality, a decent person. But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws ~be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris~ that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws.”
~Anne Rice
from The Vampire Lestat
Elegant Goddess Translation 