Transmuting the Gender Binary Through Occultism
I do not know of any religion that does not declare women to be feeble-minded, unclean, generally inferior creatures to males, although most Humans assume that we are the cream of all species … I hope, are now aware that a woman should not have to demand Rights. The Rights were there from the beginning; they must be Taken Back Again, including the Mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen or destroyed.
Leonora Carrington, 1976
Occult is not a simple term to define: from the Latin for “hidden” or “concealed”, it has morphed today into a hybridized and malleable term to refer to Western spiritual practices outside of the orthodox Judeo-Christian beliefs, running counter to much of Enlightenment’s Rationalism, with a decidedly feminist tone. Lana Louise Finley, in her article Occult Americans: Invisible Culture and the Literary Imagination, emphasizes that “ both antirational and antiempirical, the occult flagrantly resists analytical interpretation… and flouts historicization with imaginative histories and secret practices … the antithesis of the academy’s raison d’être (rational, objective inquiry) suggests a subject matter that will always and ever be marginal, barely tolerable within the edifice that reason built” (4). Fed by the Hermeticism and Neoplatonism of late antiquity, and finding its place inside the Western esoteric tradition, the umbrella of occultism now covers everything from astrology to Tarot cards, pagan holidays to meditation retreats. Enjoying an uptick in attention and enthusiasm today, particularly with the aiding and abetting of social media, occultism has been gripped by a myriad of marginalized groups to transform and transcend the binaries and boundaries that construct and constrict their lives. This study will focus on the use of occult practices by female artists associated with the surrealist movement, and its parallels with the surge of interest in occultism in modern America. In both instances, there are notable relationships between the occult traditions and the exploration and exaltation of the feminine beyond the modern concepts of womanhood in the Western world, leading to the question of whether this cynosure of the “sacred feminine” present throughout occultism simply perpetuate an alternative binary system, or if the occultic principles of transformation instead, through the emancipation of the feminine, elucidate an “esoteric gender” domain punctuated by autonomy, fluidity, and embracement of the unknown.
Female surrealists— or more accurately, female artists who have come to be associated with the Surrealist movement headed by André Breton—displayed a rich reverence for occultist imagery, practices, and beliefs. Victoria Ferentinou, in her article “Surrealism, Occulture and Gender: Women Artists, Power and Occultism”, posits that:
Most women artists were initially attracted to surrealism's quest to transcend the binaries, boundaries and dualisms of Western culture. Several were also drawn to the movement's engagement with occultism and other occultural strands. Although such interest was often claimed as their own predilection, surrealism validated and opened up the routes to the experimentation with and exploration of occulture… surrealist women often drew heavily from the iconography of scholarly and popular publications on esotericism and comparative religion and mythology circulating in Europe at the time. They also experimented with techniques adapted or partly inspired by occultism. But very importantly, for the surrealist woman, occulture operated as a site of resistance, subversion and empowerment. (p. 109)
In his article The occultation of Surrealism, T.M Baudin asserts that “as a supposed reservoir of rejected knowledge, of things considered marginal, heterodox, superseded, archaic, irrational, illogical and downright strange… esotericism can be drawn upon by individuals and groups for purposes outside of its original magical or occult contexts… the Surrealists associated themselves with this category of heterodox irrationality because it broadcasted their revolt against orthodox bourgeois society” (p. 8). In essence, the roots of female surrealists’ magnetism towards occultism lay within its heterogeneity; stemming from the hermetic philosophy expressed in one of its foundational texts, The Emerald Tablet: “whatever is below is like that which is above, and whatever is above is like that which is below”, it holds that everything that exists is related through a series of correspondences, sundering the rationale for the social inequity pivotal to patriarchal progression (Gibbons, 7). Finley notes that “it is no accident, of course, that accusations of occultism are almost always directed at these same socially marginalized and disempowered classes, and that occultism rarely gains traction as a descriptor of the activities of able-bodied, heterosexual, white men” (p. 6).
What are the characteristics of occultic practices that lead to their utilization as a means to step outside of the confines of a society’s norms, particularly in terms of gender? Occultism provides women with far greater status and autonomy towards their own spirituality than the orthodox Judeo-Christian practices have, where their inclusion in the sacred sphere is limited to that of observer, believer, and follower of doctrines that leave women reliant on male intervention for divine sustenance. Ferentinou adds that “occulture was mostly perceived as a more egalitarian locus than institutionalized Christianity or secular loci; it reinforced individual self-discovery independently of gender; it offered an alternative discourse for women wishing to renegotiate prescribed cultural categories of femininity” (p.110). Occultism has been tied to feminism and the struggle for women's rights as early as the nineteenth century, as elaborated in texts such as Diana Barsham’s The Trial of Woman and Joy Dixon’s Divine Feminine , and Ferentinou elucidates that its merit for the cause lay in the fact that “it also exalted woman's ‘nature’, legitimized her role and status in the spiritual and political realms and advertised her propensities: woman was gifted with mediumistic and clairvoyant faculties, she could communicate with organic nature through Mesmer's ‘universal fluid’ and she was to play a vital role as the female redeemer or the transformative agent of the world” (p.110). Does this ideology expand the notion of gender among its proponents, or simply re-orient the binary in a matriarchal matrix? Anne Fausto-Sterling, in her essay, “That Sexe Which Prevaileth”, inquires into the threat intersexual individuals pose towards the western gender binary system: “what if, while thinking she was a man, a woman engaged in some activity women were thought to be incapable of doing? Suppose she did well at it? What would happen to the idea that women’s natural incapacities dictated social inequity?” (p.382). Did female surrealists’ occultic embracement of the “sacred feminine” pose a similar threat, by transmuting the “natural incapacities” of woman into the very characteristics that garnered their higher status among the esoteric traditions? Can this accentuation of the feminine be seen as a route towards gender fluidity, or does it only convert the dualistic thinking that dictates the current social boundaries regarding the sexes?
The emphasis and reliance in occult practices, such as with divination and Tarot cards, on intuition and attunement to the cycles of the natural world, are marked by those facet’s historic association with women and the feminine sphere, and thus, their condemning as inferior to traditionally masculine ideologies such as rationality and objectivity. “Female surrealists, such as Valentine Penrose, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and Ithell Colquhoun, recognized in the occulture of their age an emancipating potential for women” and embraced its connection to prehistoric, gynocentric cultures and Goddess-centered mythologies “by inventing a female identity that defies categorisation… [subverting] masculinist esoteric and surrealist ideas of woman and [offering] a new, less static, model of femininity” (Ferintinou, 110 and 113). Ferentinou also explains that while occultism provided fertile soil for these artists to express and reconfigure issues of gender, power, and creativity, by “laying emphasis on sexual difference, the concept of ‘occult womanhood’ was oppositional to another contemporaneous feminist discourse that attacked essentialist ideas, attempting to place the question of woman within a materialist context” (p. 110). Perhaps this critique is itself an essentialist view of these womens’ creations, seeing the inclusion of images revering the divine feminine as the sole purpose of their work rather than as a facet of a more expansive purpose regarding a sublimation of gender as a whole.
Catherine Guthrie, in her article “Refiguring the sacred: Surreal theater as the space of alterity in the works of Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter, and Audre Lorde”, notes that “the art of male Surrealists was shaped by their acceptance of a Freudian unconscious and by their search for the means of effecting the link between the contents of the dream and the unconscious and an exterior reality … the link was often a woman, whose 'convulsive beauty' was sufficiently compelling and disturbing to break through the conscious mind's restrictive control and onto whose image could be projected the secret and often forbidden desires and obsessions lodged in the unconscious” (p. 7). Contrarily, female surrealists were looking to “disrupt symbolic structures on [their] own terms, and in doing so, gain access to the divine… refiguring the sacred in ways that escape the male economy, and in doing so, create a feminist spirituality that seeks to alter consciousness and ultimately the balance of power within Western societies” (p. 3). In regards to the question of whether the “occult womanhood” simply perpetuates a different dualism, Guthrie emphasizes the employment of the “androgyne” in the work of many female surrealists calling upon the occult science of alchemy:
The key figure in alchemy is the androgyne, the end goal of the process and synonymous with spiritual enlightenment. Despite the problematic use of this figure because of its connotations of gender essentialism and its presupposition of heterosexuality, in the works of Carrington, Barnes, Carter, and Lorde, the androgyne becomes a subversive figure… whereas male Surrealists saw woman as the intermediary between the unconscious and consciousness, these women [artists] use the androgyne, which defies gender categories, as the intermediary between the two. Whereas for Carrington, the androgyne is a figure for the Goddess, for Carter it is a figure for deconstructing gender essentialism and is a stage one passes through to the unknown in terms of both spirituality and gender identity. (p. 13)
Leonora Carrington, a British-born Mexican artist of Irish heritage, was seen to have ‘[developed] an art clearly dependent on an iconography drawn from occultism, Eastern spirituality, psychoanalysis and studies of comparative mythology: her work was specifically informed by Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, alchemy, magic, the Tarot, Tibetan Buddhism, George Gurdjieff's philosophy, Jungian psychology, Celtic and pre-Columbian myths” (Ferentinou, 115). Susan Aberth, in her book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art, looks at one of Carrington’s paintings, The House Opposite [Figure 1], showcasing the painting’s reclamation and reverence of the domestic universe:
As the title The House Opposite implies, this is a reversal of the status quo, a look into a parallel dimension where mundane domestic activities are infused with the sacerdotal. Once again, Carrington has transformed the Christian altar and the performance of the sacrament from a male liturgy officiated over by priests to a female one with no hierarchy or office. This ritual meal is designed to instigate transit and transformation- from human to animal (for example, some women have horse shadows), from the celestial to the terrestrial, and from the visible to the invisible. In this way, the artist is alluding to the earlier, non-patriarchal religions, which have been suppressed and appropriated by the church. As Carrington notes: “The Bible, like any other history, is full of gaps and peculiarities that only begin to make sense if understood as a covering-up for a very different kind of civilization which had been eliminated.” (p. 69)
Ferentinou, in detailing Carrington’s expression of occultic insight remarks that “her spiritual quest was strongly reflected in her art… an underlying theme of her work is the resurrection of an ancient world where woman plays a significant part coupled with the redefinition of patriarchal hierarchies through recourse to Goddess-related material…[privileging] pre-modern, supposedly matristic cultures, thus romanticizing the past, but also ancient Goddess-oriented religions” (p. 116). In discussing Carrington’s 1947 painting The Pomps of the Subsoil [Figure 2], Ferintinou illustrates that “esoteric motifs widely disseminated in alchemical handbooks and Jungian publications are interwoven with Goddess-centered myths into a potent pictorial image that sacralizes nature and revises patriarchal religious history… [situating a] woman in a liminal zone between life and death, human and other organic existence, and underscores the significance of metamorphosis over stasis (p. 123).
Guthrie speaks of Carrington’s engagement with the desire to metamorph the gendered reality of her time:
Carrington's art is thus a visionary art that addresses itself to those who are involved in exploring the realms of transpersonal and transpsychic reality and who feel that we are about to enter a ‘new age, one in which all our psychic powers, which have so long been neglected, will be reclaimed so that we can fully realize the potential of our psycho-physical beings and affirm our harmony with the forces of the universe and with all the species of plant and animal life on our planet. It is through a reaffirmation of the principle of female energy in the image of the Goddess that Carrington's art presages the advent of a new era in which woman is seen as the guardian of the sacred domain of the spirit and as the Supreme wisdom figure. (p. 8)
But attention to the esteem for prehistoric feminine allusions without noting the overarching preoccupation with gender transcendence through the union of masculine and feminine energies is tilting the tight gaze Carrington directs her work through. While Ferentinou encapsulates Carrington’s dearth of work into “three core themes … the veneration of nature mistreated by men, the interconnection of the human and animal realms and the empowerment of women who hold the key to the world's salvation … all central ideas are resourced from occultural sources, such as Celtic mythology, alchemy, fairy tales, the lives of Saints, Jungian psychology and matriarchal recounts of ancient religions, and remodified to [a] revisionist, feminist and eco-spiritual narrative”, there is a lack of appreciation for how occultism, and Carrington’s engagement with it, does not simply propagate the feminine as a higher power, but simply restores its venerability and stimulates its utility and necessity in birthing a society that avails of the potential present in and between the polarities of the sexes (p. 117).
In her article “A language buried at the back of time: The Stone Door and postructuralist feminism”, Anna Watz states that dominant thematic concerns of Carrington’s first novel “centre around the discovery and opening of a stone door, which will result in the dissolution of the boundary between masculine and feminine” (p. 91). With two main protagonists who embody a feminine and masculine element, Watz contends that “rather than suggesting a platonic ideal of masculinity and femininity, [the protagonists’ union] is an opening up and a reconfiguration of fixed gender identities and binary categorizations that are intimately tied to the novel’s pursuit of a new creative language, beyond the confines of phallocentric structures” (p. 94). Carrington’s use of esoteric imagery expands beyond allusion and inclusion of occultic principles, but pulses throughout the “non-linear, fragmentary and metafictional form of the novel… [suggesting] a questioning of original or truthful narratives” (Watz, 95). While maintaining the occultic principles of feminine aptitude, Carrington’s work raises the two poles of our binary to equal levels, and focuses on the potential for their coalescence more than simply reorienting the power imbalance.
Rachel Grew, in her article The Use and Significance of Alchemy in the Work of Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini, offers a reading of Leonor Fini’s work Heliodora [Figure 3], noting that “the figure personifies the alchemical androgyne, symbolic of the unification of male and female… though her body is feminine in shape and she has breasts, her genitalia are indistinct thus throwing her gender into doubt… the ‘a’ suffix to her name feminises the masculine ‘Helios’... implying the union of opposites that characterises the androgyne and the completion of the alchemical process” (p. 116). As previously remarked by Guthrie “the androgyne [is the] end goal of the [alchemical] process and synonymous with spiritual enlightenment”, and while female surrealists emphasize the feminine capacity for creation and attunement to natural world’s cycles of transformation, its direction is towards a dimension beyond the binary. Ferentinou remarks on “Fini's prioritizing of nature over society and the romanticizing of pre-modern cultures is one of the attitudes shared by agents of occulture”, detailing the occultic elements of her 1947 painting Stryges Amaouri [Figure 4]:
A title derived from a nineteenth-century almanac but re-appropriated to challenge the stereotype of powerful women as dark, evil sorceresses… the work depicts a sleeping nude man enveloped in ivy seems and watched over by a bestial hairy creature holding a small egg and a sorceress with a headdress made of a bird's skull and leaves. When questioned by her biographer she related: 'The man is asleep, a prisoner of the vegetal universe ... Women are awake, watching, powerful, like sorceresses, sometimes bestial, sometimes spiritual. They can protect and they can threaten. They possess the egg of life'.... Fini relies upon the idea of woman as closely linked with the natural world and the life/death cycle. Her description, however, reveals a holistic conception of nature that transcends spirit/matter distinctions, as well as an active role for women. (p. 124)
Again, while Fini’s work shared the occultic venerance for females’ biological capacities for childbirth and perceptible similarities to cyclical nature, her vision extends beyond simply raising women to a higher sphere, and instead acuminates at the complete transcendence of distinctions.
Gloria Orenstein, in her book The Reflowering of the Goddess, writes of a new female alchemy that aligns with the readable incantations in the work of these female artists. She argues that the goal of feminized alchemy is to:
transform the 'gold’ of a commodified world back into the beautiful 'brute matter' of the natural world…[opposing] the traditional description of the alchemical process, because instead of extracting spirit from matter or metamorphosing matter into spirit, this new female alchemy seeks to return the consciousness of spirit to matter, and to alchemize us back into realizing that the Earth herself is infused with spirit. (p. 6)
Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born artist who also took up long-term residence in Mexico City and was a close friend of Leonora Carrington, had a particularly perceptible use of alchemical imagery throughout her oeuvre. Grew describes Varo’s 1960 painting Born Again [Figure 5], noting “the vagina-like tear in the wall through which a figure enters the space beyond… the figure that is ‘born’ through the union of male and female in the alchemical process is androgynous… an argument that can be reinforced through the way in which Varo has chosen to paint this room red, the colour of the final, androgynous stage of the alchemical process and the resulting Stone… [supporting] the claim that Varo uses alchemy as a substitute for biological processes” (p. 52). Varo’s work, as with Carrington and Fini, elevates the feminine sphere to emancipate the gender binary in total, perhaps arguing that society must ennoble women in order to propagate the transcendence of gender boundaries. Varo’s substitution of biological creation with alchemical engendering can also be taken as a reference to the opportunities that occultism provides for all to engage in the magic of producing life, again establishing the draw of occultism not simply as a site of women’s power, but as a route for transcending the socialized genders that have sprouted immense inequality throughout societies, and the convoluted bundle of oppression that stretches from sexual identity to environmental policies.
Carrington, Fini, and Varo are part of an epic and interdisciplinary scope of occultic practitioners throughout time who are drawn to its anti-orthodox contentions. Today, Americans are experiencing a resurgence of enthusiasm and engagement with the concepts and practices of occultism. Tara Isabelle Burton, in her article “Rise of Progressive Occultism” published in the June 2019 edition of The American Interest, writes:
For an increasing number of left-leaning millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any organized religion—occult spirituality isn’t just a form of personal practice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a metaphysical canvas for the American culture wars in the post-Trump era: pitting the self-identified Davids of seemingly secular progressivism against the Goliath of nationalist evangelical Christianity.
In spite of, or because of, the tightening grip that the Christian right has been exhibiting on the political handles of the U.S. in recent years, Wicca is technically the fastest growing religion in the country, with its numbers rising from around eight thousand in 1990 to a combined total of over one million Wiccans and pagans in 2014 (Burton, 2019). Burton notes that “twenty-nine percent of Americans say they believe in astrology… while just 22 percent of Americans call themselves mainline Protestants”, adding that in March of 2019, numerous mainstream media outlets covered a “Twitter storm” that erupted upon progressive New York State Representative Alexendria Ocasio-Cortez sharing her birth time with the public, ensuing in-depth analysis of her natal birth chart, and AOC’s fitness for political office was amassed via the implications of the planetary constellations at the time she arrived.
In his New York Times opinion article “The Age of Aquarius, All Over Again!”, David Brooks contends that “interest in the occult rises during periods of transition and disillusion. It happened in the late 1960s, and it’s happening today. For many, the traditional organized religions are implicated in the existing power structures. Being occult is a way to announce that you stand on the fringe of society, that you stand against the patriarchy, against the heteronormative culture and against the structures of oppression.” As with the female surrealists and their maneuvering of occultism to dissolve the borders of gender, modern Americans are mollifying their spiritual angst and promoting ideologies that favor fluidity and emancipation from the patriarchal system that seems to be pulling the strings of society as insidiously as ever before. Burton asserts that “as an aesthetic, as a spiritual practice, and as a communal ideology, contemporary millennial “witch culture” defines itself as the cosmic counterbalance to Trumpian evangelicalism. It’s at once progressive and transgressive, using the language of the chaotic, the spiritually dangerous, and (at times) the diabolical to chip at the edifices of what it sees as a white, patriarchal Christianity that has become a de facto state religion”.
Much the same as the female surrealists drew their imagery from the vast ocean of the occult, the modern predilection is noted for its “remix” culture, with Burton articulating the occult cocktail common of American millennials:
Suspicious of institutions, authorities, and creeds, this demographic is less likely to attend a house of worship, but more likely to practice the phenomenon Harvard Divinity School researchers Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston have termed “unbundling”: a willingness to effectively “mix and match” spiritual, ritualistic, and religious practices from a range of traditions, divorced from their original institutional context. A member of this “remixed” generation, for example, might attend yoga classes, practice Buddhist meditation, read Tarot cards, cleanse their apartment with sage, and also attend Christmas carol concerts or Shabbat dinners. They might tap into the perceived psychic energy of their surroundings at a boutique fitness studio like SoulCycle, which openly bills itself as a “cult,” and whose charismatic trainers frequently post spiritually tinged motivational mantras like “You were created by a purpose, for a purpose” on SoulCycle’s social media platforms. The underpinnings of religious life—meaning, purpose, community, and ritual—are more likely than ever to come from diffuse traditions, or indeed no tradition at all.
Is the impetus for the occult in modern America related to the complex gender transfiguration of the surrealist women, or is today’s aim an even broader desire for emancipation from all societal structures that perpetuate inequality of any variety? Alternatively, is the presence of the occult today undercut by the ease of engagement that social media creates, meaning that its “practitioners” do not to extend the same effort as earlier generations to be exposed to its ideas , and does that ease of engagement lead to a shallower understanding of the foundations of these esoteric traditions? Carrington, Varo and Fini reportedly read stacks of ancient texts and devoted massive swaths of their lives to exploring and encapsulating the occult throughout their artistic pursuits— can following an astrologer on Instagram provide anything akin to that level of understanding? While obviously the modern, mainstream American occultist is likely to lack the breadth of knowledge and context that the female surrealists accrued through their work, are they related in their simplest form by a desire for the dissolution of the “Rationalism” enforced borders that have come to encapsulate humanity in the western world?
Burton continues that the modern occultism brands itself beyond solely exalting the feminine:
contemporary witches understand witchcraft as a practice for those on the societal margins, a reclamation of power for those disenfranchised by unjust or oppressive systems. While traditional New Age culture focused primarily on the experience of (usually white) women, contemporary witch culture frames itself as proudly, committedly intersectional: an umbrella community for all those pushed to the side by the dominant (white, straight, male, Christian) culture. Symbols and images of the uncanny, the demonic, and even the diabolical are recast as icons of the falsely accused, the wrongly blamed, the scapegoated.
As with the female surrealists, the tenor of transformation that rings throughout the occult sciences seems to sound out to groups whose socialized identities have left them bound in base metal cages that they ache to recast. For example, at a recent exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York, “visitors [were] greeted by two large illuminated portraits of nude bodies on the surface of caskets standing on end, one belonging to the artist and the other to h/er late partner and muse… the unorthodox pronoun “h/er” is not a mistake but the preferred way to address the genderless existence of the pandrogyne, a state of male-female fusion the two were seeking to achieve by way of surgical incursions and rituals to combine souls” (Battaglia, 2016). Occultism imagery can be found throughout many trans and non-binary artists lexicon, such as Genesis P. Orridge, Jonah Welch, and Bracciale, helping to extend the esoteric gender concepts beyond their historic association with female-identifying artists.
Clearly, the alchemical underpinning of occultism maintains its advantageous appeal to the marginalized masses, particularly regarding the masculine/feminine binary, and while many Americans engaging with these esoteric ethos today share in its heterogeneous ideology, the occult appears to still conjure a gynocentric affiliation. This year alone, almost half a dozen articles published in the New York Times inquire about the trendiness of witchiness— “Here’s What Being a Witch Really Means” (June 6, 2019), “Witches are Having Their Hour” (Oct. 11th, 2019), and “When did Everyone become a Witch?” (Oct. 24th, 2019), just to name a few— connoting the rise of “witch culture” to women’s issues being at the front and center of much of the political discourse today. Pam Grossman, a self-identified witch and prominent writer on all things witchy, asserts in her Time Magazine article “Yes, Witches Are Real. I Know Because I Am One” that “the fact that the resurgence of feminism and the popularity of the witch are ascending at the same time is no coincidence: the two are reflections of each other” (2019). While modern America is patently more open to non-binary gender identies and all the spectrum of sexualities that have gained acknowledgement, there is a continued relagation of the occult to a narrowed feminist context, lacking its monumental intention of transcending the desire for gender differentiation at all, through the amalgamation of masculine and feminine energies into the alchemical androgyne.
The acceptance and inclusion of a sexual continuum, mitigated through the reviving of a lost reverence for the ancient inclusion of the divine feminine, has made occultic practices a vibrant vessel for radical resistance against the codified gender binary of the western world. While the nexus of the interpretations and explanations of occultism continues to encircle a narrowed translation as a practice that glorifies Goddess-centric mythologies, traditional feminine domains and characteristics, the female surrealists clearly sought to use the exaltation of women and the feminine experience as a means towards the ambitious and prodigious goal of decomposing the gender binary altogether and bringing humanity into harmony with its kindred forces throughout the universe. While today’s spike in sales of Tarot decks, healing crystals and “Witch” ephemera can be discerned as a product of the inevitable cycle of interest in the occult, coupled with the mounting uncertainty regarding the longevity of our planet, there are resonating strands that tie this generation’s ambitions of social equity and eco-conscious living to the grand esoteric objectives of those before: calling upon the sensuous and irrational Mother Goddess to disrupt the domineering dogma of an oppressive patriarchal system and bear us a new dimension.
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