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remain unseen throughout their travels along theswelling cone until they made themselves visible on the screen in their deceptively large size. Yet they were shadows! They were less than the molecules of dust whose tiny bodies whirred so loudly in the cone of light. These shadows travelled unnoticed within the billions of dust particles, from the tiny, four-sided hole in the apparatus behind our backs to the four-sided sea that took form before our eyes.
    There I saw naked women for the first time, that is to say, the shadows of naked women.
    It is not my intention to suggest that this is a means of temptation used by the Antichrist.
    For it was God who created naked people and not the Antichrist. And as we do not inherently see sin in nakedness, thus does the Antichrist want to seduce us by nakedness alone. No, not through nakedness does he reveal and betray himself but, rather, through the purpose for which he uses our nakedness and also our clothing.
    On the screen they showed an Egyptian princess. She was bathing naked in the Nile with some naked playmates. She fished out a little box, daubed with pitch inside and out. In this box lay Moses, the future leader of the Jews, the lawgiver of the world.
    Very small, infinitesimally small, was the box in which lay Moses, the leader of the Jews and lawgiver of the world.
    But large and pretty were the breasts and thighs of the princess and her bathing friends, and, although the lawgiver of the world amounts to much more than a woman’s breast, the box in which he lay immediately disappeared as though swallowed up by the cone of light, and the princess splashed towards the shore, and we saw her back as before we had seen her breasts.
    And as everything in the world has its rank and degree, I believe that even the truth of true things is falsified and turned upside down when these are used as pretexts for that which is great and sublime.So in using the wondrous discovery of mankind’s lawgiver as an excuse for showing the beautiful back and pretty breasts of the Egyptian princess, they destroyed the beauty of her body.
    And this is one of the aims of the Antichrist. It is ever his goal to desecrate
one
marvel through use of another. By this, too, we may recognize him.
    Later the war was shown. It was the Russo-Japanese War. Entire regiments were marching. They didn’t move from right to left or vice versa; rather, they came, as small as specks of dust at first from the background of the screen (which was not really a background), growing ever larger, swelling and marching directly towards us as they became ever more enormous, and they appeared as if they were about to trample over the front rows of spectators with their hobnailed boots. The first double row of marching soldiers were already lifting their massive feet to step upon our necks, and we began to duck in anticipation of the footfalls. But then they vanished, just as shadows vanish. They couldn’t survive outside of the screen. They had achieved as much as shadows can achieve. They had been able to grow, to swell to the size of a colossus. But in the same degree to which they grew larger they also became more transient and empty, and the textured surface of the screen began to show under the impending threat of their iron-shod boots. They were large, these shadows, but also porous. Holes appeared, bright holes, in the midst of their vast bodies, and the more threatening they seemed the more powerless they grew. The first column dissolved into space, then the second, the third, the fourth, the tenth. Soon we realized that we didn’t need to duck any more. But, just as this terror was overcome, an even greater one attacked us. And this was caused by our realization that the columns marching towards us were theimages of actual troops. In the instant they were filmed marching they had been alive. Through the act of filming they had become shadows, the shadows they should not have become until later but