Wisdom goddesses are a primary survival of Goddess
consciousness within patriarchal systems. In an intact Goddess cosmology,
Wisdom is not sharply differentiated from other divine qualities. In
that sense the separation is artificial, and typical of the divisions
that arise when theologians erect their esoteric hegemonies. But I’m
struck by the recurrence of Wisdom deities in the “major”
religions, and how archaic streams of Goddess reverence continue to
flow through them under the doctrinal surfaces. For seekers groping
a way back to Origins, it can be illuminating to meditate on divine
Wisdom in these forms.
Khokhmah and Sophia
Max Dashú
Thou art a Wisdom. Thou are a Knowing. Thou
art Truth.
Because of Thee, there is life. Life is from Thee.
Because of Thee, there is mind.
--The Three Stelas of Seth, an Egyptian Gnostic scripture
The ancient Hebrew name for Wisdom is Khokhmah, a feminine
noun. In Jewish scripture, it was Khokhmah who personified the female
Divine. She is understood as an emanation of God, yet she resonates with
the Hebrew Goddess who is otherwise assailed in the Bible, especially
Asherah, she of the sacred Tree. Proverbs 3:18 calls up an image of Khokhmah
that originates in the oldest core of Jewish culture: “She is a
Tree of Life to all who lay hold of her.”
In the same book, Khokhmah sings, “The one who finds me, finds life.”
Like the goddess Asherah, regarded as the partner of Yahweh by the ancient
Hebrews, Khokhmah is linked to the pillar. “My throne was in the
pillar of cloud,” she declares in Ben Sirach (24:4). In Proverbs
9:1 she builds a house of seven pillars.
Asphodel Long’s book A Chariot Drawn by Lions offers profound
insights into the survival of the Hebrew Goddess. She points out that
Wisdom is another form of the Shekhinah, the divine Presence. Both are
“expressed in light and glory,” both involved in creation,
enthroned in heaven, intermediaries between god and the world, ascending
and descending, and winged.
The Book of Wisdom of Solomon, written by Alexandrian Jews in
the Hellenistic era, renames Khokhmah as Sophia, the Greek word for Wisdom.
In this text, as Long points out, Sophia “takes over the powers
and function of God” and the creation story is told using the word
“she.” The ancient author is careful to qualify this audacity
by describing Wisdom as God's breath and emanation, but still praises
her at length in her own right as “holy” and “all-powerful”:
For in her there is a spirit that is intelligent,
holy, unique, manifold, subtle;
mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct,
invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible,
Beneficent, human, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful,
overseeing all and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent
and pure and most subtle.
For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she
pervades and penetrates all things. [Long, 46-7]
Another beautiful passage likens Wisdom to “a flame
of stars through the night.” [Allegro, 171] The praise-names in
the Book of Wisdom of Solomon resonate deeply with those in the goddess
litanies of India. The most celebrated of these is the Sri Lalitaa
Sahasranama, an invocation of Goddess under a thousand names, including
Intelligence, Holy, Unique, Multiformed, Subtle, Pure, Beyond All Danger,
Loving the Good, Beneficence, Steady, Without Anxiety, Great Power, and
All-Pervasive.
Long’s illuminating exegesis of the Alexandrian Wisdom litany brings
forward the little-known fact that the Greek name monogenes (“unique,
singly born”) began as a title of female divinities. It originates
in a Kemetic title of Neit, Hathor and Isis: “self-born, self-produced,”
and later appears in Orphic hymns to Demeter, Persephone and Athena. Christians
subsequently applied it to Yeshua of Nazareth who was cast as the “only-begotten
son” of god. [Long, 49]
In late antiquity other titles arose in the Judaic tradition: Shekhinah
(Divine Presence) and Matronit (the Mother). Kabbalists redefined Khokhmah
as a masculine power, and assigned Binah (Understanding) to the feminine
sphere. Torah became to some extent a personification of Wisdom, and Jews
in many countries invited Shabbat to enter their homes as the bride of
god and the essence of peace and joy.
There is not room here to enter the Egyptian Stream of Wisdom, but what follows can only be understood in the light of the veneration
of Auset, known in Hellenistic culture as Isis. This goddess had come
to be worshipped beyond the borders of Egypt, first in west Asia and north
Africa, then in Europe. Isis aretalogies (praise-songs based on the affirmation
“I am”) emphasize creative Wisdom as one of her divine qualities:
I am Isis, mistress of every land
I laid down laws for humanity and ordained things that no one may
change...
I divided the earth from the heavens
I made manifest the paths of the stars
I prescribed the course of the sun and moon
I found out the labors of the sea
I made justice mighty...
—Aretalogy of Isis from Cyme, circa 200 CE [Drinker,
114]
A syncretic ferment of Egyptian, Greek and Hebrew traditions occurred
in Alexandria and the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman empire. Jewish
writers appear to have initiated a Greek series of Oracula Sibillina which
begin to appear around 150 BCE. Philo Judaeus of Alexandria identified
Sophia as Mother of the divine Logos and as Isis, mother of Horus. But
Philo followed Biblical tradition in according primacy to the father-god
as creator, treating the divine mother—Sophia — as his attribute
or emanation. Nevertheless, he described this god as the husband of Wisdom.
[Long, 46, 162; Patai, 98]
The pagan priest Plutarch agreed that Isis was the same as Sophia, creator
of all. [Allegro, 157] Pagan mystery religions equated Isis with Demeter,
Kybele, Juno Caelestis, Bona Dea, Tyche and other Mediterranean goddesses,
mixing their attributes and titles. Isis was sculptured wearing the mural
crown of the Asian goddess Tyche and holding the cornucopia of the Italian
Fortuna and Terra Mater. (These statuettes have been found in distant
Kazakhstan and Pakistan.) Multitudes of molded figurines of Isis seated
on the basket of the Eleusinian Mysteries were mass-produced for home
altars within Egypt itself.
Most of these Hellenized terracotta statuettes shrink the horned solar
crown of the ancient Kemetic goddess and flank it with ears of wheat,
assimilating her to Demeter in a historical double rebound. The Knot of
Isis that was for millennia tied around her belly moves up to her breast
in a tied Grecian shawl. Other terracottas show Isis Baubo with skirts
pulled up around her hips and legs opened wide. Still others look to the
headwaters of the Nile, as the goddess Besit, linked to the BaTwa peoples,
socalled "pygmies," or perhaps to other little people (“dwarves”).
In the midst of this syncretism, many Isis terracottas retain the Egyptian
convention showing her suckling her son (now represented as a sketchy
afterthought). She also appears as Isis Bubastis -- Ermouthis to the Greeks
-- with the lower part of her body in the form of a snake. This form of
Isis has turned up as far east as Iraq.
Some Egyptian Jews engaged in ecstatic forms of worship. Philo wrote that
the Therapeutae (“healers”) became “transported by divine
enthusiasm.” They danced and sang hymns in harmonies and antiphonies,
women with women and men with men. Then, says Philo, they feasted and
drank wine, and at last all joined together in one assembly:
Perfectly beautiful are their motions, perfectly beautiful their
discourse; grave and solemn are these carollers; and the final aim of
their motions, their discourse, and their choral dances is piety.
[Drinker, 159-160]
The Therapeutae were among the Jewish sects in which women “conducted
the Sabbath services and provided influential commentaries on the scriptures.”
[Long, 38] Philo described their practice as a form of spiritual healing,
which in fact gave this community its name:
Inasmuch as they profess to the art of healing better than that
current in towns, which cures only the bodies, they treat also souls
oppressed by grievous and well-nigh intolerable diseases. [Contemplative
Life, in Allegro, 109]
The biggest community of Therapeutae lived near the Mareotic lake in northern
Egypt. Their huts had little prayer alcoves, and they gathered in a central
building for communal meals. Like Philo, they seem to have syncretized
Isis with Wisdom and called upon her for healing: “She was reckoned
to cure the sick and to bring the dead to life, and she bore the title
'Mother of God.'“ This was an ancient name of Neit, Isis, and other
Kemetic goddesses.
The Gnostic Goddess
The syncretism of Judaic, Egyptian, Hellenistic and Persian
traditions gave rise to Gnosticism, a name which arose directly from an
emphasis on inner knowing. Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls,
what was known of the Gnostics came mostly from their sworn enemies, the
institutional clergy. When church patriarchs selected the books that became
the canonical christian bible, they rejected some of the earliest texts,
Gnostic scriptures. Among these excluded scriptures were writings that
pictured Wisdom as a divine, creative female presence.
The Goddess was still well-loved in Egypt, whose ancient religion exerted
a tremendous influence on early Gnostic philosophy. The Gospel of
Thomas retains an invocation from ancient litanies of Auset: “Come,
lady revealing hidden secrets...” Aretalogies of Isis made their
way into several Gnostic scriptures, as Great Isis continued to be syncretized
with Judaic wisdom traditions of Khokhmah under Hellenistic names.
The Gnostic scripture Eugnostos the Blessed hails “the all-wise
Sophia, Genetrix.” It was she, says the Origin of the World, who
“created great luminaries and all of the stars and placed them in
the heaven so that they should shine upon the earth.” This Gnostic
passage echoes the Isis Aretalogy of Cyme: “I divided earth from
heaven, I created the ways of the stars...”
Other Egyptian Gnostic texts name the Divine Female as Ennoia (Thought),
Pronoia (Forethought) or Protennoia (Primal Thought), Pistis (Faith),
Sige (Silence), Eidea (Image, Idea), or Charis (Grace). These titles are
often used interchangeably with Sophia. Several texts address the goddess
as Arche (“beginning”), following the Hebraic representation
of Wisdom as Reshiit in the Palestinian Targum and the Samaritan Liturgy.
[Arthur, 65, 55, 61; Long, 87ff]
The early Egyptian Gnostics embraced the Wisdom goddess as a power higher
than the god who created the world. A Greek-Coptic text named Origin of
the World reworks Genesis to show the Goddess taking part in creation,
and restores Eve to her primordial sacred status as the Mother of All
Living. In a section known as the “Eve intrusion,” Sophia
creates “the Living-Eva, that is, the Instructress of Life.”
This androgynous being takes form according to the image of the Mother,
and proclaims her identity with her. She assumes titles of Isis, such
as “consoler of the labor pains.” [Arthur, 99, 117, 131]
This book calls Eve “the mother of the living,” a title that
goes back to the earliest Hebrew roots, and even further, to the Sumerian
goddess Ninti. In this telling, it is Eve who gives life to Adam. The
archons beheld Eve and compared her to Sophia, “the likeness which
appeared to us in the light.” They plotted to rape and “pollute”
Eve, and to cast Adam into a sleep, teaching him that she came into being
from his rib “so that the woman will serve and he will rule over
her.” But Life/Eve laughed at their scheming, darkened their eyes
and left her likeness beside Adam. “She entered the tree of knowledge,
and remained there. She revealed to them that she had entered the tree
and become tree.” The archons ran away in fear, but later came back
and defiled Eve's likeness. “And they were deceived, not knowing
that they had defiled their own bodies.” [Young, 54; Arthur, 207]
A Nag Hammadi scroll called the Testimony of Truth deifies the
wise Serpent who counsels Eve to eat the fruit of knowledge: “On
the day when you eat from the tree which is in the midst of Paradise,
the eyes of your mind will be opened.” The scroll's author points
out that god's threat of immediate death didn't come true, but the Serpent's
promise of knowledge did. He calls the god of Genesis “a malicious
envier” who begrudged humans the power of knowing. This theme of
an imperfect creator god recurs in other Gnostic texts. Sophia rebukes
this god as a liar and fool when he, unaware of her role in creation,
claims sole divinity.
Another form of the syncretic Egyptian Gnostic goddess is the mysterious
Barbelo. Presented as an emanation of god, she resembles Khokhmah. But
christian Egyptian texts refer to Mother Barbelo as part of a trinity,
along with the Father and Son. The Barbelo literature's attempts to reconcile
conflicting traditions result in contradictions. The Gospel of the Egyptians
says that Barbelo originated from herself, as the ancients had said of
Neit, Mother of the Gods. But the Three Stelas of Seth present her as
“the first shadow of the holy Father,” who had existed before
her. It addresses her with feminine pronouns, but paradoxically praises
her as “the male virginal Barbelo.”[Arthur, 165-6] A later
passage reverts to goddess imagery:
Thou art a Sophia. Thou art a Gnosis. Thou art truth. Because of
thee, there is life. Life is from thee. Because of thee, there is mind...
Thou art a cosmos of truth. Thou art a triple power... [Arthur,
166]
The Sethian Gnostics said that this trinity was made up of Light, Breath,
and Darkness. The Peratae had it as Father, Son and Matter, with the Son
mediating between the exalted Father and a passive female principle. [Philosophumena,
in Doresse, 52, 50]
However, the Trimorphic Protennoia exalts “Barbelo,
the perfect glory,” from whose thought originated the trinity of
Father, Mother, Son. This scroll contains an aretalogy that unambiguously
praises the goddess Protennoia as the origin: “I am Primal Thought
that dwells in the Light... she who exists before the All... I move in
every creature... I am the Invisible One within the All.”[Pagels,
55; Long, 92-3] Her divinity is immeasurable, ineffable and radiant. [Arthur,
168]
The Apochryphon of John contains another aretalogy of “the
perfect Pronoia (forethought) of the universe,” who was “the
first.” She wandered in the great darkness, “into the midst
of the prison,” even into the depths of the underworld. She represents
“the light which exists in light.” But this christian text
compared “sister Sophia” unfavorably to Barbelo. A splintering
of Gnostic goddess images was underway. They were being subordinated to
“the Father,” and those not firmly partnered to a male god
disparaged. The derivative Gnostic aretalogies reflect an emerging concept
of the “fallen” goddess.
The longest Gnostic aretalogy appears in Thunder, Perfect Mind
(originally titled The Divine Barbelo). It follows the form of
the old Isis litanies: “I am the wisdom of the Greeks / And the
knowledge of the barbarians / I am one whose image is great in Egypt...”
Unlike the aretalogies, however, Thunder is marked by dualism, pairing
negatives—“ignorance... shame... fear”—with Barbelo's
divine qualities. [Arthur, 164, 175] Still, it contains verse of remarkable
beauty and profundity:
I am the first and the last
I am the honored one and the scorned one
I am the whore and the holy one
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the mother and the daughter
I am the members of my mother
I am the barren one, and many are her sons....
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
And the idea whose remembrance is frequent
And the word whose appearance is multiple
I am the utterance of my name.
Though Sophia is prominent in the Gnostic creation accounts,
she was being stripped of the radiant holiness the Egyptians attributed
to Isis and the Hebrews to Khokhmah. In her ground-breaking and all-too-little-known
study The Wisdom Goddess, Rose Arthur shows how the positive
view of Sophia in the early, pre-christian scriptures was gradually broken
down and degraded by a masculinizing, christianizing movement that emphasized
a “fallen Sophia.”
Arthur demonstrates that the older texts were consistently reedited to
reduce and subordinate female divinity, while exalting the male god. The
Hypostasis of the Archons is no more than “a christianized,
patriarchalized and defeminized summary of On the Origin of the World.”
It blatantly substitutes the christian god for the Gnostic goddess. For
example, the line “But all this came to pass according to the Pronoia
of Pistis” becomes “But all these things came to pass in the
Will of the Father of the All.”
The pre-christian scripture Eugnostos the Blessed was revamped
as the Sophia Jesu Christi, in which Sophia rebels against the
“Father of the Universe,” repents of her fault, and is saved
by her male partner, Jesus Christ. The revisionist text repeatedly refers
to the “fault of the woman.” The same process was at work
in the Pistis Sophia, where the fallen Sophia is made to sing
thirteen hymns of repentence before Jesus helps her to regain the spiritual
heights.
These new patriarchal discourses still had to contend with a deep-rooted
conviction in the Goddess as the ultimate source of life. Even hostile
writers acknowledge that Sophia gives the breath of life to Adam, though
they show this happening indirectly. But they view the material creation
as evil, imprisoning the souls who live in it. Often Sophia herself is
shown falling into bondage.
In one Gnostic myth, Sophia was made prisoner by the seven archons. The
essence of Wisdom made flesh in female form was subjected to every indignity,
including being forced into whoredom. In one version, Simon Magus rescues
“Helena” from a brothel in Tyre. But in actuality she is the
creator of the angels who made the world. She is called Kyria, Lady, a
Greek term corresponding to the christian god's title Kyrios. [Allegro,
141-5] These stories don’t refer to idealized notions of sacred
harlots making love in freedom, but to female degradation in the prison-brothels
of the Roman empire. While they may be taken as an affirmation of the
presence of the sacred within the enslaved women, they also demark a clear
demotion of the Wisdom goddess, who has lost her original sovereign power.
The earlier view of Goddess as the supreme Source, or alternatively as
a male god's perfect partner, now gave way to the idea that she was a
lower being in need of pardon and salvation. New authors developed themes
of a deluded and foolish Sophia (contradicting the very meaning of her
name, “Wisdom”). They accuse of her of breaking cosmic law
by creating without a male partner and describe her creation as defective.
[Couliano, 78-9]
While these writers blamed Sophia for conceiving alone, they praise the male god for creating without a partner. In their tellings, Sophia he is cast down and made to suffer
and repent until a superior male god deigns to “correct her deficiency.”
As Sophia is mythically overthrown, other female figures pick up aspects
of her power, but the force of the Gnostic Wisdom goddess is almost spent.
Under the oppressive climate of the Roman empire, with its heavy taxation,
displaced populations, urban crowding, plagues, slave economy, and arena
executions, to say nothing of pervasive violence against women, a profound
negativity had seeped into religious consciousness. People felt like prisoners
in the world, and a conviction arose that creation itself was flawed.
The taint reached back to the Goddess herself, since she manifested herself
in matter, in birth, in bodies.
This new doctrine identifying the female with bondage, weakness, inferiority
and fault was the final means of overthrowing the Goddess Mysteries in
the Mediterranean. The process was erratic. Judaic Wisdom mysticism, so
influential in early Gnosticism, exalted the creative power of Khokhmah,
and held that creation was good, even though the female is formally subordinated
to the male throughout the Bible. But increasingly Gnostics gravitated
toward an “value-inversion,” not only revolting against the
Biblical god, but rejecting all creation as well.
Although Gnostics were strongly influenced by Judaism, which features
Wisdom as a co-creator, many of their writings evince a strong animus
against it. Some emphasize the female creative principle, while others,
especially the later texts, demote her. Much of Gnostic scripture reinterprets
the biblical creation story, making Yahweh (cast as Ialdabaoth or Saklas
or Authades) junior to the creating Wisdom goddess, unaware of her presence
but working with her light. Possibly this theme originated as a reassertation
of the Goddess (especially she of ten-thousand-names in Egypt) whose scattered
signatures are visible in the Gnostic amalgam of Hellenistic, Judaic and
Persian cosmologies. Some of these accounts can be read as a defense of
her divinity and creative power as against the increasingly influential
concept of a masculine god as sole creator.
But the syncretic Goddess of late antiquity was gradually
subjected to heavy-handed reinterpretation as Gnostics embraced a heavily
polarized doctrine of dualism. Thei rejection of the “lower”
world ended up dragging down the Goddess in the midst of its attack on
Judaism. It demanded rejection of the body, of lovemaking and the ancient
birth mysteries: of Earth and Nature herself. New christian doctrines
stripped Sophia of her divine qualities, dramatically subordinating her
to the Father and to Christ as her male partner and savior. Later writers
dropped the name Sophia altogether. Some introduce new names, but the
visible trend is away from myths exalting a creatrix.
The variant picture of the Gnostic scriptures reflects an intense campaign
to beat down goddess veneration and to split body and spirit. The tension
is more open in the Gnostic gospels precisely because the female divinity
is still powerful, in contrast to the christian canon. It was in Egypt
and other centers of the Mysteries that the last stand for open Goddess
worship was fought -- and ultimately lost -- on the battleground of Gnosticism.
Eradicating the Goddess proved to be an impossible task. She survived
in myriads of forms in popular belief, veiled as Mary or christian saints.
The Virgin Mary occupied a much less powerful position in church doctrine
and scriptures than the old pagan Goddess. Folk tradition is another story;
there devotion shifted to Mary from the old goddesses and persisted over
centuries as new ethnicities entered christendom. Due to this popular
pressure and the role it played in the clergy's conversion strategy, Mary
escaped the degradation that Gnostic christians ended up heaping on Sophia,
and the stigma that theologians cast over Eve. Catholicism ended up absorbing
goddess traditions over the centuries, through progressive engorgements,
while Gnosticism gradually shed them.
But the story of Sophia does not end there. Her Greek worshippers succeeded
in assimilating her to Orthodox christianity, as Hagia Sophia. The greatest
cathedral of the Byzantines was raised in honor of this “Holy Wisdom,”
supported by the great porphyry pillars taken from the Ephesian temple
of Artemis. The early Orthodox Greeks regarded Hagia Sophia as a female
member of the Trinity, the "Holy Spirit.” This strand persisted
in Orthodox Christian mysticism, and is still a force in Russian spirituality.
Western Christian feminists have also reclaimed it in recent decades.
This title of “Holy Spirit” also belonged to Ruha d’Qudsha,
the goddess of the Iraqi Mandaeans. She had been
demonized by the Christian era, but she is an Aramaean analogue to the Hebrew Shekhinah: compare
Biblical ruach, “spirit” and qadoshah, “holy,”
and remember, too, the ancient Canaanite-Egyptian goddess QDSU or Qudsha.
The Aramaean goddess undergoes the same debasement in Syria and northern
Iraq as Sophia had in the eastern Mediterranean. Ruha d’Qudsha,
as mother of the “evil” planets and zodiac spirits, is another
fallen, or rather toppled, goddess. She is called deficient and defective,
and must be uplifted and guided by the Father.
The Torah uses the word “hovering,” as with beating wings,
to describe the divine Presence that Talmudic writers had begun to call
the Shekhinah. Her image resonates with the ancient veneration of doves
as sacred to Canaanite, Syrian, and Cypriot goddesses. Christians adopted
this imagery, picturing the Holy Spirit as a winged radiance and a hovering
dove. She flutters above Mary in innumerable scenes of the Annunciation,
and above the consecrated chalice and bread.
As for Khokhmah, she remained a presence within the Hebrew Scriptures.
Thousands of years after her praises were embedded in the Book of Proverbs,
medieval christian mystics were attracted to this female image of Wisdom.
Hildegarde of Bingen knew her as Sophia, Scientia Dei, and Sapientia of
the seven pillars. One of her manuscripts even shows her wearing the mural
crown of the ancient goddess of Asia Minor. Hildegarde’s profoundly
animistic poetry sings the praises of Life endowed with Wisdom, as a goddess
in all but name:
I am that supreme and fiery force that sends forth all living
sparks. Death hath no part in me, yet I bestow death, wherefore I
am girt about with Wisdom as with wings. I am that living and fiery
essence of the divine substance that glows in the beauty of the fields,
and in the shining water, and in the burning sun and the moon and
the stars, and in the force of the invisible wind, the breath of all
living things, I breathe in the green grass and the flowers, and in
the living waters...
[Book of Divine Works, circa 1167, in Partnow,
The Quotable Woman, 48]
Copyright 2000 Max Dashu.
This article was originally published as chapter III of Streams of
Wisdom
(Oakland CA: The Suppressed Histories Archives, 2000).
An early serialized version appeared in Goddessing Regenerated,
a journal edited by Willow LaMonte, Malta, 1998.
SOURCES
Allegro, John, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, Prometheus,
Buffalo, 1984
Arthur, Rose, The Wisdom Goddess: Motifs in Eight Nag Hammadi Documents,
University of America Press, New York, 1984
Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen, Female Fault and Fulfilment in Gnosticism, University
of North Carolina Press, Chapel, 1986
Couliano, Ioan, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity
to Modern Nihilism, Harper, San Francisco, 1992
Doresse, Jean, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, Viking Press,
NY, 1960
Drinker, Sophie, Music and Women, Coward-McCann, New York, about 1948
Long, Asphodel P, In a Chariot Drawn by Lions: The Search for the Female
in Deity, Crossing Press, Freedom CA, 1993
Pagels, Elaine, The Gnostic Gospels, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London,
1979
Patai, Raphael, The Hebrew Goddess, Wayne State U Press, Detroit, 1990
(The third edition is updated and contains a new chapter on the Kabbalah.)
Young, Serinity, An Anthology of Sacred Texts by and about Women
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