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In the forest God met the Stag-beetle. "Hold! Worship me!" quoth God. "For I am All-Great, All-Good, All Wise....The stars are but sparks from the forges of My smiths...."
"Yea, verily and Amen," said the Stag-beetle, "all this do I believe, and that devoutly."
"Then why do you not worship Me?"
"Because I am real and you are only imaginary."
But the leaves of the forest rustled with the laughter of the wind.
Said Wind and Wood: "They neither of them know anything!"
COMMENTARY (Ν)
St. Hubert appears to have been a saint who saw a stag of a mystical or sacred nature.
The Stag-beetle must not be identified with the one in Chapter 16. It is a merely literary touch.
The chapter is a resolution of the universe into Tetragrammaton; God the macrocosm and the microcosm beetle. Both imagine themselves to exist; both say "you" and "I", and discuss their relative reality.
The things which really exist, the things which have no Ego, and speak only in the third person, regard these as ignorant, on account of their assumption of Knowledge.