From guardian.uk:
The world God made soon turned out to be flawed, perhaps - as the Manicheans suggested, inherently evil. Who could be held responsible for its moral mess? Not God himself, who assures us throughout Genesis that his work is good; there had to be an agent of corruption, a tempter. Satan was therefore conjured up, created - as Kelly shrewdly remarks - out of nothing, like the universe that God allegedly fabricated ex nihilo. Once the stooge had been invented, he was demonised, turned into a bogey to frighten the credulous. Hence the red-hot eyes, the horns and the cloven hoofs, the shaggy pelt and the stink of sulphur. The iconography is a costume, wittily shed by the dandified, sophisticated Satans of the 19th century. When Mephistopheles appears out of a puff of smoke in Gounod's opera Faust, he shows off his natty cape, his plumed hat and a rapier with which he intends to prick all sanctimonious certainties. He is, he says with a Byronic grin, 'un vrai gentilhomme'.
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2 comments:
legend has it that mick jagger's lyrics for sympathy for the devil were inspired by The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which had just been finally published in the 60's after being basically censored for like 30 years. jagger's devil was described as a dandy.
Now that would be a great soundtrack for this sequence.
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