Indeed, ‘modern’ people are distinguished from ancient people mainly by the fact that they have already introduced Hades, the realm of shadows, into the world. The Hades of modern man is Hollywood.
THUS INVENTION, A GIFT OF THE MIND, BECAME AN ELEMENT OF THE ANTICHRIST
But it would be easy and foolish, as I have already clearly stated, to curse invention and the reason from which it is born. For the inventor has done nothing other than apply God’s gift of sense. If, however, one makes use of a divine gift and it then acquires an evil purpose, the evil element must have injected itself between the moment of invention and that of its application in real life. And just as gold, for example, should have been a gift of nature, a blessing of the earth, but has become an element of the Devil so, too, invention, a gift of reason, has become an element of the Antichrist. For the Antichrist becomes most clearly recognizable by the fact that he transforms what is essentially noble into something lowly. It is truly the nature of his existence and activity to desecrate the holy, to degrade the sublime, to pervert the true and to scar the beautiful. Not satisfied with his reign over what is in essence vulgar — for this is admittedly also a component of the earthly world — he seeks to extend his dominion over the noble. However, it could never fall under his power if it remained noble, so he first transforms it into something evil. He is like a dictator whose own land is a desert and who, in order to vanquish his flourishing neighbours, first turns those thriving places into wastes so that they are like his own. If he did not make them like his own, they could not be subservient to him.
But he, the Antichrist, is therefore worse than such a tyrannical ruler because a dictator can be seen, heard, felt and hated, whereas the Antichrist has the power to transform a thriving country into waste land and, in doing so, to dupe us into believing that the waste land is flourishing. And, when he destroys, we think he is creating. When he gives us a stone we believe he has given us bread. The poison from his glass tastes like the elixir of life. We think that he himself, the Prince of Darkness, is a son of both Heaven and earth; so long as we live, this seems to us more than being the son of Heaven alone. He enters thusly; he speaks thusly: ‘You were promised Heaven, but I give you the earth. You were supposed to believe in an unfathomable God, but I turn you yourselves into gods. You thought that Heaven was more than earth, but earth itself is really a heaven!’
And since it is in our innate nature to yearn eternally to become God — because we never forget our origins and are reflections that are always searching for their prototype — we are seduced by the Antichrist. He can easily transform our most noble longings into lowly envy. For longing and jealousy are twin sisters, the one beautiful and the other ugly, who can nevertheless be mistaken for one another. It is inherent in our nature to want to be gods. The Antichrist, however, tells us we are already gods. And, as it is inherent in our imperfect nature that we grow tired and permit our senses to be tricked, he exploits our weaknesses and changes the milestones on our long path into goals. And we believe him. We are always searching, as long as we live, for our eternal home. But long before we have reached it we think that we are already there, thanks to the tricks of the Antichrist. And because our feet become weary, we believe him. Our home is still infinitely far away. But by no means do we go towards it. We halt by the wayside. We remain in the desert and imagine that we have reached our eternal home.
When a poor man tires of his poverty, how soon he stops fighting it and begins to see it as wealth! A prisoner who is serving out a life sentence in gaol believes after ten years of solitary confinement that the prison yard is actually freedom. And thus we, who can separate our shadows from our bodies so they act independently, as though they were human, believe that we already possess the divine power to bring something to life that does not exist. What an illusion! We have, in fact, brought nothing to life!
We have instead granted the greater part of the short life that was gifted us to our shadows! We have not created life; we have lost it! We have not created; we have squandered! And we have squandered sinfully.
THIS IS THE AIM OF THE ANTICHRIST! TO DESECRATE ONE WONDER THROUGH ANOTHER
It is not possible to talk about the Antichrist if one has not met him; and by this I mean if one has not met him actually and in the flesh. As for me, I have met him in many forms. Since my early youth our paths have crossed. I spoke before in such detail about the theatre of shadows because it was there that I first encountered him.
My first contact with the Antichrist happened many years ago, when I was still a boy and saw the wonder of the living shadow for the first time. There came a large vehicle, powered by unseen forces, which stopped at an open plaza outside of town and sent forth a large machine that was covered with a small canvas tent. Then a large tent, also of canvas, was pitched, spread and domed, and one could see upon entry that the interior of the dome was a blue sky with numerous gold and silver stars scattered about. And it was as real as the firmament. The human eye is not capable of seeing more of the actual heavens than can be shown on the spacious dome of a marquee, and the spectators’ eyes therefore saw just as much or as little as they can see of the heavens when they look up at night. Blue was the dome, and the stars were just as unreachable and just as distant as real stars. Since we are not tall enough even to reach the roof of a circus tent erected by men, it was all the same to the people who sat under this roof if the sky was real or a reproduction. Neither one of them was within reach of their hands.
Consequently, they were quite willing to believe that the fake was real. And as it was very dark below and within this canvas tent the people inside believed that they were sitting under a bright and starry summer-night’s sky. We heard an unfamiliar rattling and a humming and buzzing and chattering and thundering from some strange origin. And above and below we saw some kind of four-sided cone that was born from a minuscule square hole, the brightness of which was enveloped by black walls. This cone grew slowly and symmetrically over the spectators’ heads, ever fuller, ever clearer, with its edges becoming more clearly visible in the pale light until it reached and filled the screen, as though a river of pale light were to pour itself into a sea of pallor, illuminating the latter through its own brightened pallor, so that it became visible as a four-sided sea. And we could see the vertical and horizontal threads stretched out on the four-sided sea. The four-sided cone that whirred above our heads made an incredible noise, and when we looked at it we were led to believe that the ruckus came from the billions of dust particles within rubbing against one another. Our ears were shocked that such minuscule molecules of dust and nothingness, even though there were billions of them, might be able to emit such an audible whir. So that we could no longer hear the sound of the dust molecules, an orchestra below the screen began to play marches and waltzes. And this, indeed, drowned out the whir of the dust molecules.
When the first shadows came to life on the rectangular screen and the marches and waltzes played up from the orchestra, the drums beating and the cymbals clashing, we could no longer hear the whirring of the dust particles. But we felt that the little square hole above our heads at the back of the crowd, the birthplace of the dust-laden cone, was the place where the life-sized shadows acquired their lives. Clearly, they sprang from the tiny four-sided hole and could remain unseen throughout their travels along the swelling 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.