Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Moore

Moore lands the punch with a heresy disguised as a truism: Satanism, at least in its popular moral-panic form, doesn’t actually escape Christianity so much as it clings to it like a shadow. Calling it a “disease” is clinically cruel on purpose. A disease doesn’t have its own independent ecosystem; it mutates inside a host, feeding on the host’s logic while disfiguring it. The line is less theology than systems critique: you can’t make Satan a meaningful villain without first accepting the Christian narrative architecture that makes him legible.

The subtext is a jab at how institutions manufacture their own enemies. Christianity supplies the cosmology (good/evil, temptation, damnation), then acts shocked when someone cosplays the negative space. Moore’s phrasing also punctures the idea of “Satanism” as a coherent counter-faith. If your rebellion depends on the original rulebook, you’re still playing the same game; you’ve just switched jerseys.

Context matters because Moore is a writer obsessed with how stories colonize reality. From Watchmen’s deconstruction of heroes to his later public fascination with magic and myth, he’s suspicious of grand narratives that pretend they’re natural facts. Here, he’s exposing Satan as a narrative device that only works when the audience is already trained in Christian symbolism. The wit is in the trap: the more terrified someone is of Satanists, the more they inadvertently admit their own belief in Christianity’s metaphysical cast list.