Paracelsus
Berlin, 26th April 1906
Indeed, it is attractive to become engrossed in the past and to
look around among the great spirits who preceded us. However,
with the personality about which we want to speak today quite
another matter than the charm of historical consideration comes
into question as point of view. It rather matters with
Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541,
physician, occultist) that he can give the human beings very
much still today. Just a movement of the spiritual
investigation of matters as spiritual science is particularly
suitable to unearth the treasure, the spirit of knowledge, the
investigation, and enlightenment of nature, which is hidden
with Paracelsus. Today, indeed, modern research turns more or
less also to spirits like Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, and others
of the end of the Middle Ages. However, the approach of our
present science is so different from the spirit, the point of
view of a man like Paracelsus that it cannot do justice to him
in the true sense of the word.
For
Paracelsus has to be understood in another way than it normally
happens if one becomes engrossed in a spirit of the past. One
has to develop a living feeling of the object and the direction
of thinking to which he dedicated himself. This is in certain
respect such a deepening in the spiritual life, in particular
in the spiritual forces and beings that form the basis of
nature, and only the spiritual-scientific approach does this.
Paracelsus already belongs to an interesting time. It was the
time from 1493 to 1541 in which he lived that was either just
over or was still right in the middle of the emergence of the
bourgeoisie. This exerted a significant influence on the entire
spiritual life.
Two
classes only had the greatest say concerning the spiritual life
before the emergence of the bourgeoisie: nobility and clergy.
After bourgeoisie had emerged, the intellectual culture was
based more on the single personality and its efficiency.
Before, the blood relationship, the clanship had a say within
the nobility in the worth and the social position of the human
being, on the one side, and, on the other side, the whole power
and intellectual culture of the church supported the priests.
It stood as a whole behind the single personality. Only in the
time of the bourgeoisie, the performance of the single was
based on the personal efficiency. Hence, everything that meets
us in this time of the ending Middle Ages, the emerging
bourgeoisie, gets a personal character and the personality has
to fight for himself much more. We could quote many of such
personalities who had to use their very own forces at that
time.
One
of the strangest and most interesting personalities is just
Paracelsus. Other things still came into consideration in his
lifetime too. This has been just in the time when the scene of
the peoples increased enormously when the big discoveries of
distant countries were done, in the time when the just invented
art of printing pointed the spiritual life to quite different
directions and currents than it was once the case. All that
delivers the basic tableau, so to speak, from which this
personality of Theophrastus Paracelsus emerges. To all that is
to be added that we are concerned with a seldom-prominent
person, with a person of revolutionary character in the
spiritual sense. He was a person who was aware of that which
was performed once in the realms of the spiritual life and how
much his own work contrasted with it.
In
order to understand Paracelsus, one must look at the basic
character of his work as a doctor and as a philosopher, and
grasp him as a theosophist, as he combined these both soul
characters with each other. This personality was uniform. With
brilliant look, he tried to grasp the construction of the world
edifice. His surprised sight looked up at the secrets of the
starry heaven, became engrossed in the construction of the
earth and in particular in the construction of the human being
himself. This brilliant sight penetrated also into the secrets
of the spiritual life. He was also a theosophist, while he
tried to enclose the nature of the astronomical knowledge and
at the same time the nature of anthropology, the doctrine of
the human being in connection with the doctrine of all living
beings. Nothing was mere theory in him, everything was
immediate in such a way that it was bent on practise, that he
wanted to use all that he knew for the welfare, the spiritual
and physical health of the human being. This gives his work,
his thinking, and investigations the big, immense unity. This
makes him appear as sharply carved from one single piece of
wood. Thus, he stands before us as an original, elementary
personality.
There were two schools for him in the field with which he was
mainly concerned, with the medical art. The one went back to
the old Greek physician Hippocrates (~460-370 B.C.), the other
to Galenus (129-200 or 216 A.D., physician, philosopher). The
father of medicine, Hippocrates, stood before him like a big
ideal. The modern scholar can cope neither with that which that
Greek was, nor with that which Paracelsus saw in him. Indeed,
it seems rather problematic today if we hear that this medicine
differentiated four humours in the human being: black bile,
white or yellow bile, blood and phlegm, which were said to have
a certain relation to earth, water, air and fire. These should
be components of the human nature. Of course, the modern
naturalist regards as a childish point of view, which a
detailed knowledge had to overcome in the course of time. He
does not anticipate that it depends, nevertheless, still on
anything else.
That is why the modern academic view understands Paracelsus so
exceptionally. He did not at all understand these four members
of the human nature as usual physical humours and. The
naturalist of that old time regarded the substances with which
the human body builds itself up from the physical,
sense-perceptible substances, only as the external expression
of something spiritual, of the real builder of this external
body.
In
spiritual-scientific talks, we have often spoken about this
builder of the human body. We have spoken about the etheric
body, a fine body, forming the basis of the physical body and
all its manifold materials, substances and humours. This
etheric body or life body contains the forces to build up the
physical body. It is in such a way that this etheric body
builds up any. Sensuous research does not suffice to study this
etheric body; something else belongs to it, namely intuition,
spiritual research. If one uses sensuous expressions of that
which is considered for this spiritual research, like black,
white, yellow, green et cetera, one only means metaphors of
something that is behind. It is quite wrong if one identifies
them with our material things.
The
way in which the old doctors approached the ill human beings in
the medical centres was another. It was the intuitive view,
which they directed not to the physical, but to the finer, the
ethereal underlying the physical. One started out from the
idea: if anything is ill, it is less crucial, which external
changes are discernible, but what has caused them. The disorder
in the external physical body corresponds to the disorder in
the etheric body. The old doctors recognised how the etheric
body changes in the ill organism, and they were out to cure
that force, which is behind the physical body as the sculptor.
If I may express myself somewhat roughly, one can say, if
anybody has fallen ill with the stomach, he suffers not from
the stomach, but from the finer body the expression of which
the illness only is.
Paracelsus had taken up the spirit of such an intuitive
medicine in himself. However, the Roman doctor Galenus worked
everywhere like an authority. Indeed, he bases his medicine on
these old principles, and if one reads Galenus externally, one
gets the idea: what does Paracelsus really intend fighting in
such a way against Galenus and taking the older medicine under
his wings? Is it not the same? — It could almost seem
that way, however, it is not in such a way. For Galenus
externalised medicine while he materialised the originally
spiritual view. The pupils of Galenus already understood by
that which was once meant intuitively, as something externally
material. Instead of using the intuitive view, they researched
only in the matter, speculated, invented theories. The moral
view had got lost.
Paracelsus opposes this method, this loss of the intuitive
view. He wanted to go back; he wanted to find the means to cure
the human beings from the knowledge of the big nature.
Therefore, all that was antipathetic to him, which prevailed in
those days officially as medicine. He did not want to take as
basis that which one can read in the books, but wanted to open
the fundamental book, the big book of nature. Everything that
had emerged gradually as medicine was spun out from a
completely deduced speculation, from a research that knew
nothing of the original spiritual view. There one could no
longer see the connection between a medicament and an illness
because one just did no longer behold what is behind the body
because one looked only materially at everything. This caused
that Paracelsus said, the light of nature should shine
again.
It
brought him into a sharp conflict with the medicine of his
time. Such a great insight, as he had it, his reasonable nature
that grasped the big connection with the universe gave him the
intensive self-confidence, which has something lovely, in the
way in which he behaved towards those who practised science in
generally accepted way at that time. However, the pharmacology
of that time bears big analogy to that of today, with the
difference that our time has no Paracelsus in the medical
field. However, confusion and insecurity were almost the same
as they are today. This reminds very well of that old time of
Paracelsus. If we pursue medicine today, we see how a remedy is
invented and then is regarded and rejected as something noxious
after five years, how so and so many people are examined, but
the big view of the coherence of the human being with nature
has completely got lost. That reminds rather well of the time
of Paracelsus. It is true that most people do not anticipate
that they are again embedded in such a time and that the belief
in authority has such an immense power just in this field. One
struggles against the belief in authority on one side, and one
considers oneself superior campaigning against the old
superstition that sends people to Lourdes.
One
may be right with it, but one does not anticipate that only the
form of superstition has changed and that superstition becomes
hardly smaller if one sends anybody to Wiesbaden (spa town) and
other places. One can see in it something similar as it existed
with Paracelsus and his time when one was inclined to oppose
the conventional. Paracelsus said, “As I take the four
for me, so you have to take them also and to follow me and I
have not to follow you, you have to follow me. Follow me, you
Avicenna (~980-1037, Persian polymath), Galenus, Rasis
(854-927, Persian polymath), Montagnana, Mesue (~777-857,
Assyrian physician) and all those from Paris, from Cologne,
from Vienna and from the regions of the Danube and Rhine
rivers, from the islands, from Italy, from
Dalmatia, Sarmatia, Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you
Israelites, follow me, I do not follow you. I become the
monarch and the empire will be mine, and I lead the empire and
gird your loins.” That as a characteristic and expression
of his personal strength. He believed to owe this strength to
his original relationship with the secrets of nature. She
expressed herself for Paracelsus in such a way that he saw not
only what he saw with his eyes, but with his being, which
combined with nature.
He
undertook big journeys. He did not want to listen to anything
scientific from the chairs, but from the dark intuitiveness of
the simple people outdoors who had not yet cut the band of
feeling with nature; he wanted to learn from them. I would like
to bring his soul condition to your mind by a comparison. It is
rather nice to see how the animals know instinctively for sure
in the field what they have to graze and what they have to
leave what serves them for their welfare and what would become
detrimental to them. This is based on the relationship of the
being with its environment. This relationship exists in the
soul forces and is able to choose what is good and what is not
good.
The
being breaks free from nature by the intellect and speculation.
It is no superstition, if one says that the simple human being
who lives in the countryside has still something of the
original forces, which lead the animal to its food
instinctively, that this relationship still delivers something
of the knowledge how the single herb, how the single stone
works on the human being. This feeling is different from the
usual knowledge, which, however, is no longer so important for
him. Hence, one finds with a human being, who has not yet gone
through education, an original certainty what is useful for him
within nature. Paracelsus feels related to this original
feeling for nature. He emphasises repeatedly that those people
are not the right ones who wander the world in such a way that
they travel around the world in carriages and apart from the
immediate contact with the rural population. Paracelsus
travelled differently. He listened to that which the simple man
could say to him. The instinct of the simple man became to him
the intuition of the ingenious human being. He did not cut the
connection between nature and the original intuitive force in
the human being. He expresses this in such a way: “By
nature I am not spun subtly, it is also not the way of life in
my country to acquire something with silk spinning. We are not
bred with figs, nor with mead, nor with wheat bread, but with
cheese, milk, and oat bread. That cannot make subtle fellows
because one is dependent on that which one has got as
adolescent. Such a human being is almost rude compared to the
subtle men feeling superior, to superfine people, and to those
who have grown up in soft clothes and in boudoirs, whereas we
grow up in fir cones, therefore, we do not well understand each
other.”
He
knew that he always walked on his journeys through Poland,
Hungary to Turkey in the sun, not only in the sun of the
physical world, but also in the spiritual sun. What
distinguishes Paracelsus is the uniform sight in the spiritual.
Hence, the human being is to him not the human being in whom
one slips in with the sensory examination, but he is connected
with the whole nature. He says, look at the apple and then at
the apple pip. You cannot understand how the pip grows if you
do not look at the whole apple.
That is why one also does not understand the elementary human
being if one does not recognise the earth with all its
substances and forces, because it has all its strength from the
earth. Then a force incorporates a finer materiality in this
physical elementary human being. Paracelsus calls it the
archaeus. From the elementary body, he distinguishes the finer
body, which is the builder of the physical body and the builder
of the earth. Thus, he looks from the externally
sense-perceptible at the cause, from the body at the life body,
from the externally physical at that which as a force forms the
basis of it. This is the first member of the human being in the
sense of Paracelsus.
He
regards the second member as a pip in a certain different way.
For this second member the apple is the whole world of stars.
Just as the elementary body draws his forces and humours from
the earth and from that which belongs to it, the second human
being draws his forces from that which lives in the stars, from
the principles of the stars. Just as the blood, the muscles,
the bones, and food juices are composed and the food juices
change, are transformed, and as these are dependent on the
earthly, Paracelsus summarises the instincts, desires, and
passions, the ideas, joy and sorrow, all that as the two basic
forces of the human mental nature, sympathy and antipathy. They
are expressions of the whole world of stars, as the pip is an
expression of the whole apple. Therefore, he calls the second
body the astral body or the body related to the world of
stars.
What works outdoors as gravity or gravitation, as force of
attraction and repulsion is in the human being like in an
essence as desire and listlessness, as sympathy and antipathy,
so that nothing of that which is in the human being as
instincts and passions can be understood different from the
astrological astronomy as Paracelsus calls it. This is a
science about which our time knows precious little. Astronomy
took another path. Paracelsus as a doctor wants to know nothing
about it. He wants to know how the astral forces are connected
in space with the astral body of the human being. He behaves
compared to an astronomer like a priest to a requiem parson. A
requiem parson is someone who reads the mess and is paid for
it, whereas a right priest is someone who penetrates into the
spirit. Paracelsus uses clear expressions what others often
call rudeness. We have now understood the second part of human
wisdom.
The
third part is that which he calls spirit. This spirit relates
to the spiritual world like the pip of the apple to the much
bigger apple, like the divine spark in the human being to the
whole sum of divine forces in the world. Thus, Paracelsus
differentiates in the world: the divine-spiritual, the
astrological-astronomical, and the elementary-earthly. The
human being contains an essence of them: the human mind from
the spiritual-divine, the astral body from the
astrological-astronomical, and the physical body from the
elementary-earthly.
Just as one has to study the material, the plants, and animals
and so on if one wants to understand the body of the human
being, the doctor has to study and understand what goes forward
in the world of the stars if he wants to understand the human
being. Because Paracelsus says to himself, one understands an
illness only if one goes back to its origin, he looks for the
reason of the illness in the desires and passions. He considers
the illness as a result of mental fallacy and finally he leads
it back to moral qualities even if he also does not lead back
these qualities to the stars, because he knows very well that
the effect does not happen so fast.
He
sees an expression of the spiritual everywhere in the physical.
That is why he says, someone who wants to investigate the
reason of an illness has to study the reason of all the
sympathies and antipathies of the soul, and he can study this
only if he studies the stars of the human being. Thus, you
imagine how he approaches an ill human being. With an intuitive
view, this soul digresses from the externally ill limb to that
which lives internally in the soul of the human being.
From there he goes to the astral influence of the stars and to
the elementary influence of the earth. He has this in every
single case before him. Just this is spiritual medicine. How he
imagines this, and how he tries to make clear with his own
picture, he expresses this nicely in this deciphering of the
whole world: “This is something great you should
consider. Nothing is in heaven and on earth that is not also in
the human being, and God who is in heaven and on earth is also
in the human being.” — I have often quoted another
nice saying where he compares what he wanted to say here. He
says, look out at nature. What is there? He sees a mineral, an
animal, a plant, these are like single letters and the human
being is the word that is composed of these single letters. If
one wants to read the human being, one has to collect the
single letters in the big book of nature. — This does not
mean that Paracelsus picks up the things, but that he tries to
get a synopsis of the things in nature. This has always enabled
him to keep in sight the whole world with the single special
case, which he has to cure as a doctor. Behind all that, the
ingenious-moral strength works from which all that arises with
him. At last, it is something like moral indignation that
rebels in him against the way conventional at that time to cure
and to find mixtures for all possible things. He says, I am not
there to enrich the apothecaries; I am there to cure the human
beings.
One
has to realise that Paracelsus used words quite unlike in later
time if one fairly wants to read his writings. If you read
salt, mercury, and sulphur with Paracelsus, one has no right
idea automatically, one thinks of what today the human being
calls in such a way. Everything that one reads with Paracelsus
seems then to be imperfect and childish. Who knows science
today has a certain right to regard Paracelsus as childish, but
one has to penetrate somewhat deeper. I want to give you an
idea how you can get around to understanding what he means if
he uses the terms salt, mercury, and sulphur. Paracelsus looks
far back into the evolution of the earth, in the evolution of
the beings, which live round him, and of the human being. If he
looks back in such a way, a time faces him in which the human
beings still had forms of existence very different from
now.
Nobody gets as clear about what has become as Paracelsus. The
earth was completely different millions of years ago. We have
spoken of the transformation of the earth often enough. He
looked back at a human figure that was still completely animal
where the hands were still locomotive organs where the human
being still lived in air and water. The earth, the surroundings
were quite different. Even modern physics looks back at an age
in which that which is solid today was still in a liquid state.
Paracelsus, who started from the spiritual, saw a spiritual
human being in connection with such an earth that still looked
quite different from today. On an earth, which was so much
warmer than today, the present human being could not live.
At
that time, the human beings also lived under other conditions.
At that time, the metals were still liquid, they could hardly
be contained as steam in the air. At that time, the living
beings could also not take shape; however, they have developed.
Just as today the elementary human being is connected with the
physical world as the pip with the apple, the primeval human
being was differently connected with the primeval earth and
with the entire surrounding astral world. Therefore, that which
constitutes the present physical human being, his soul as the
astral body and his mind as a divine human being had still to
emerge. This was quite different from once. The human being was
still closer to the divinity. The astral human being is born
out of the astral world, and the physical human being is born
out of the entire physical world. Paracelsus spoke in a much
greater and nobler sense of the origin of the physical human
being from the physical surroundings than our modern theory of
evolution. Paracelsus understood this, and he emphasises it
also repeatedly, but for him the human being is a confluence of
all that which lives outdoors in nature. The human being has
passions; he has them in himself, only in reduced form as the
lion has them, for example, and as they exist in the
environment. If the human being looks at the lion in the sense
of Paracelsus, he sees the same force that lives today as his
passion in him born out of the astral world.
In
the lion, it is one-sided, with the human being it is mixed
with other forces. The entire animal realm is to Paracelsus
like a fanned-out humanity. He sees everything that is
distributed in the forms of the animals in himself, invisible
in his inner human being. That also applies in certain respect
if the human being looks at the earth. The metals that have
become physical today are born out from the same being from
which the physical human being is born out. Please, understand
me properly, because it is far from present ideas. Paracelsus
sees back to the time when the physical human body had only
built the heart. There are lower animals that have no hearts
that still preserve the form that the human being had at that
time. This was to Paracelsus the same time when from a much
more general essence of the earth the gold also developed, so
that a connection exists between the origin of the gold and the
human heart. He also sees a connection between abnormalities
like cholera and the arsenic. He says to himself, the
possibility that cholera could originate depends on the fact
that the arsenic is developed from the external world. He
considers any single organ as belonging to the human unity and
it is in such a way that it belongs to him like any animal, any
plant, or any substance in the external world.
I
would like to read out another remark that shows you how he
expresses himself in particular. This is a remark that is got
out of a number of remarks of Paracelsus, which one could
multiply by thousand. He regards the single human being as
specifically related to the physical world and the astral world
concerning his single organs and the recognition of their
illnesses. It is differentiated in the most certain way. One
admires the general expressions of modern pantheism, of the
modern view of nature, but this is the purest dilettantism if
one does not know that the great Paracelsus cannot be pleased
with an all-life, which enjoys life in the single human being.
Paracelsus speaks of something concrete: “That is why you
should not say, this is cholera, this is melancholia, but this
is arsenicus, this is aluminosum; and also he is a Saturnian,
that is a Martian, and not: this man suffers from melancholia,
that man suffers from cholera. For one part is from heaven, one
part is from earth, and they are intermingled like fire and
wood, because everything loses its name; since these are two
things in one.”
As
he explains the connection of the heart with the gold, he also
explains the connection of certain phenomena with Saturn and
another with Mars and that, which is related to Mars. The
peculiar mind of Paracelsus positions the human being that way
in nature, in the world. Even if there is to correct anything
with Paracelsus: it depends on the great, on the comprehensive
that lives in this soul.
He
attributes this to single certain types. Thus, everything that
originates as a precipitation in the mineral is elementary to
him. At the same time, it originated in the developmental time
when the human-bodily formed and took on the figure on earth,
which it has today. Hence, every deposit of the mineral,
everything salty is connected with the human-bodily, with the
animal-bodily. He calls everything Mercurial, changeable that
remains liquid after a certain precipitation has taken place.
Mercury is to him a typical example of it. Thus, we have a
trend towards the solidification of the liquid metal. The soul
is also born out of the same universal forces from which the
Mercurial was born out. The deeper connection is in such a way
that one cannot discuss it publicly at all.
Sulphur and the present form of mind have a parallel cause of
origin. However, they are not connected allegorically. No
— these three things outdoors in the world correspond
exactly to the body, the soul, and the mind of the human
being.
Sulphur is connected according to its nature with the mind,
mercury with the soul, and salt with the body of the human
being. What the human being takes up besides is related to
these in a certain respect because they are born out of them.
Therefore, such an example shows us that we have to go in
deeper. It is not enough if we understand the expressions of
Paracelsus only; we must approach the books of Paracelsus with
a deepened preparation, and then we understand him. We have to
realise that he always has the whole in mind. Therefore, he
says to himself, if the human being has an illness, it is an
interruption, a disturbance of a certain balance. He calls it
magnetic balance and — as there is never one pole in the
magnetic needle, but always north pole and south pole together
—, any digestion in the human body belongs to a digestion
outdoors in the world, which he searches then. In the etheric
human being, he searches the cause of the individual, in the
material; he searches the expression of the spirit. In this
respect, he calls the material the mummy. One has only to
understand this significant expression. It is a certain essence
that forms the basis of the bodily; the mummy is different in
the healthy and the sick person because the whole and the
individual is changed. Therefore, one needs only to recognise
the mummy, the changes in the etheric body to recognise what a
person lacks.
Briefly, we see there into the depth of a spiritual life from
which one can learn quite a lot. We have to realise that only a
detailed spiritual research can understand again what is
contained in Paracelsus. If one understands so detailed, he
does no longer appear as a spirit whom one regards only as an
interesting historical object, but as a spirit whom one has to
consider from a higher point of view and from whom one can
still learn quite a lot also in our time — at least from
his method. One should position himself to Paracelsus in this
way. Someone who does this finds in his lovely-rude manner a
difference between the modern way of research and his way, a
difference that he already made for his contemporaries. He
distinguishes two reasons, the reason that looks into the whole
realm of the spiritual life, and the reason that is only bent
on the single one. He calls the one the first reason. He calls
it in such a way because it leads to the concealed spirit of
the things He calls the other reason a public folly compared
with the concealed wisdom. He expresses himself even lovelier
or more rudely saying, one has to distinguish a human-divine
reason and a bestial reason.
He
does not express himself in such a way that he speaks of the
animal and spiritual nature of the human being, but of the
bestial one. He considers the human being as a son of the
animal genus. The animal is spread in single facets; the animal
is summarised in the human being. He says once, the human being
is the son of the remaining animal realm. However, if he wanted
to be like the other animal beings, they would not understand
this, they would look like at a wayward son and would be
surprised about that which he has become.
Apart from that, you can also receive elementary instructions
of certain theosophical basic concepts from Paracelsus. What
Paracelsus argues about dream and sleep is in the most eminent
sense what also spiritual science has to say about it, only he
expresses it in his superb language. If the human being sleeps,
the elementary body is in the space, and the astral human being
is active. Then the astral human being can dialogue with the
stars, so that he only needs to remember the dialogue with the
stars to help, to cure the sick person. He is able to lead back
all that to the prophets. He esteems them more than all the
later ones. He calls Moses, Daniel, and Enoch not magicians,
but he says, if one understands them properly, they are the
precursors of this great astronomical-astrological medicine,
which has worked for humanity.
Such a man was allowed to have a self-confidence in certain
ways, and the strength of his work flows out from this
self-confidence. However, he was clear in his mind also that
what he had donated must live on and will live on with those
who can recognise it. In spite of it all, a lot of gossip and
historical gossip approached him. One examined his skull to
slander him because this skull had a hole and one has to think
much of such external things. One verified that he fell a
victim to drunkenness and broke his skull. One wanted to judge
his whole life this way. One can state the parable of Christ
Jesus with the dead dog where Christ Jesus pointed to the nice
teeth of the animal. The other things of such a personality do
not concern us, besides that which we can learn from him, by
which he has become a benefactor of humanity who overcame so
much and by which he has become immortal.
Let
me close with his own words that he throws in the teeth of his
adversaries: “I want to elucidate and argue in such a way
that until the last day of the world my writings must remain
and will remain true, and yours are recognised as full of bile,
poison, and brood of vipers and are hated by the people like
toads. It is not my will that you should fall down or be
knocked down a year hence, but you must show your shame after a
long time and you certainly fall through the cracks, I shall
judge you more after my death than before, and even if you eat
my body, you have only eaten filth: the Theophrastus will
struggle for the body with you.”
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