The mysterious journey from Britain’s warrior goddess to Saint Brigid of Kildare and Haiti’s fierce Mother of the Cemetery
There is a line preserved within Haitian spiritual tradition that stopped me in my tracks:
“Manman Brijit, li soti nan Angletè.”
“Maman Brigitte comes from England.”
It is an extraordinary statement. Long before Saint Brigid tended her sacred flame at Kildare, another powerful female figure bearing essentially the same ancient name was worshipped across northern Britain. She was Brigantia: a goddess associated with the Brigantes, the great tribal confederation whose territory stretched across much of northern England and into the borderlands of what is now southern Scotland.
Across the Irish Sea, we later encounter Brigit, the pre-Christian Irish goddess whose name belongs to the same linguistic family. Then comes Saint Brigid of Kildare, one of the most extraordinary women of early Irish Christianity, whose sacred landscape gathered around an oak, a monastery, a tomb, healing traditions and the famous flame that would become inseparable from her name.
Centuries later, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, another Brijit appears. This Brijit does not stand beside an Irish holy well. She stands amongst graves. She is Manman Brijit, Maman Brigitte or Grann Brijit, one of the powerful spirits of Haitian Vodou associated with cemeteries, ancestors, healing, justice, fertility, sexuality and death.
She is fierce, protective, irreverent and unapologetically alive. Strong alcohol and hot pepper belong to her world. She can curse, laugh, heal and defend. She stands in the cemetery not as a passive figure of mourning, but as a spiritual authority at the boundary between the living and the dead.
So how did a Brijit appear in Haiti? Why does one tradition remember her as coming from England? Could some distant strand of the Brigid tradition really have crossed the Atlantic, or are we witnessing something more complex and perhaps even more fascinating: the creation of a new sacred figure at the crossroads between Africa, Europe, Christianity, colonialism, resistance and survival?
This is the story of Brigantia, Brigid and Maman Brigitte, and it may be one of the strangest journeys the name Brigid has ever made.
Brigantia, Brigid and Maman Brigitte — three sacred women separated by centuries and oceans, yet connected by a name whose roots reach deep into the ancient world. Could an echo of Brigid really have crossed the Atlantic?
The High One: Brigantia of Britain
Our journey begins not in Ireland, but in Britain.
Brigantia is not a goddess reconstructed only from later folklore. Her name survives in Roman-period inscriptions, giving us direct archaeological evidence that she was worshipped in Britain, particularly across territories associated with the Brigantes.
One of the most remarkable surviving representations of her comes from Birrens, the Roman fort known as Blatobulgium, close to the modern Scottish border. There Brigantia appears carved in stone wearing a turreted crown and carrying the attributes of power. Her imagery incorporates elements associated with the Roman goddesses Minerva and Victoria, linking her with protection, sovereignty, wisdom and victory.
This image is striking because it is so different from the gentle, pastoral Brigid many of us have come to know through later Christian devotion. Brigantia is powerful and commanding. She carries a spear. She appears as a sovereign presence connected with the land and the people who bore her name.
The linguistic connection between Brigantia and Brigit is also important. Both names belong to an ancient Celtic word family associated with ideas of height, eminence and exaltation. Brigantia has therefore often been interpreted as something close to “the High One” or “the Exalted One.”
The relationship between the British Brigantia and the Irish Brigit is not simply something modern spiritual writers have invented. Their names genuinely share ancient linguistic roots, and early Irish material also contains intriguing language describing Brigit as victorious.
Perhaps somewhere beneath the different cultures that preserved them lies the memory of an older sacred feminine figure whose name carried power long before either Britain or Ireland became Christian.
Brigantia reimagined from the archaeological evidence. This House of Bridie artistic interpretation is inspired by the surviving Roman-period relief discovered at Birrens (Blatobulgium) in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The original relief depicts Brigantia winged and armed with a spear, combining native British identity with attributes associated with the Roman goddesses Minerva and Victoria.
From Brigantia to Brigit
Across the Irish Sea, the name changes slightly.
Brigantia becomes Brigit.
In early Irish tradition, Brigit is associated with powerful forms of creativity, healing, poetry and sacred knowledge. Later, Christianity gives us Saint Brigid of Kildare, whose life became so interwoven with older Irish symbolism that separating saint from goddess has fascinated historians, folklorists and spiritual seekers for generations.
We should be careful about simply declaring Brigit the goddess and Brigid the saint to be one continuous historical person. The evidence is more complicated than that. Yet it is impossible to ignore the recurring sacred themes surrounding the name: healing, inspiration, fire, fertility, animals, sovereignty, holy landscape and extraordinary female authority.
By the seventh century, Kildare had become one of the most important religious centres in Ireland. It was remembered as a great double monastery connected with both Brigid and Bishop Conleth, and early descriptions of the church reveal a sacred place of remarkable beauty and importance.
The seventh-century writer Cogitosus describes the bodies of Brigid and Conleth resting in magnificent tombs on opposite sides of the decorated altar. Their shrines were embellished with precious metals and stones, and pilgrims travelled to Kildare because the sacred bodies of its founders remained there.
Brigid was therefore not merely buried at Kildare. Her presence continued to make Kildare sacred after death.
And that becomes unexpectedly significant when our story reaches Haiti.
House of Bridie pilgrimage to Kildare. More than thirteen centuries ago, Cogitosus described the magnificent tombs of Brigid and Bishop Conleth standing on opposite sides of Kildare’s altar, at the heart of one of Ireland’s great centres of pilgrimage.
Brigid, Conleth and the Sacred Dead
There is a particularly tempting claim that sometimes appears when Brigid and Maman Brigitte are compared: that Saint Brigid was the first woman buried at Kildare, mirroring the Haitian tradition surrounding Brijit.
During my research, however, I could not find reliable historical evidence that Saint Brigid was literally the first woman buried in Kildare’s cemetery. It is important not to turn an attractive parallel into a historical fact simply because it fits the story.
What the early evidence does tell us is almost as interesting. Brigid’s body occupied one of the most privileged sacred locations imaginable, beside the altar of her own great church, opposite Bishop Conleth. Her tomb became a centre of pilgrimage and devotion. The sacred woman remained present in the landscape long after her physical death.
This does not make Saint Brigid and Maman Brigitte the same figure, but it creates an intriguing resonance between them. In both traditions, a sacred woman continues to exert authority through her relationship with burial, place and the dead.
At Kildare, Brigid’s tomb helped make the monastery a destination for pilgrims.
In Haiti, the relationship between Brijit and the cemetery becomes even more explicit.
An artistic reconstruction inspired by Cogitosus’ seventh-century description of the richly decorated tombs of Brigid and Bishop Conleth beside the altar at Kildare.
Across the Atlantic: Meet Maman Brigitte
Now the landscape changes completely.
We arrive in Haiti.
Haitian Vodou emerged principally from the religious worlds carried into the French colony of Saint-Domingue by enslaved peoples from West and Central Africa. Under conditions of extreme violence and displacement, African spiritual systems survived, adapted and transformed. They encountered Catholic imagery, European beliefs and the complex cultural world of the Caribbean, eventually developing into a religion that was distinctly and powerfully Haitian.
Within this world we encounter Manman Brijit, Maman Brigitte or Grann Brijit.
She belongs to the Gede, the extraordinary family of spirits associated with death, ancestors, fertility, sexuality and the cemetery. The Gede challenge the idea that death and life are opposites. Their spirituality repeatedly places them beside one another.
Death meets fertility. Mourning meets laughter. The cemetery meets sexuality. Grief and irreverence occupy the same sacred space.
Maman Brigitte embodies this contradiction beautifully. She can be fierce and confrontational, yet she is also associated with protection, healing and justice. She belongs among the dead, yet she carries an almost overwhelming vitality.
She is not frightened by death because she already inhabits its territory.
An original House of Bridie artistic interpretation of Maman Brigitte, inspired by her place within Haitian Vodou as a powerful lwa associated with the cemetery, ancestors, death, justice and protection. Haitian artists, including the celebrated Vodou priest and painter André Pierre, have created important representations of Gran Brigitte from within Haiti’s living religious tradition — a reminder that, whatever intriguing connections may be explored with Brigid or Brigantia, Maman Brigitte belongs first and foremost to the sacred world of Haitian Vodou.
The First Woman of the Cemetery
One of the most compelling traditions surrounding Brijit concerns the first burials within a cemetery.
In Haitian Vodou traditions, the first person buried within a cemetery may acquire particular spiritual authority over that land. The first male burial can become associated with the male guardian of the cemetery, while the first female burial may become associated with Brijit or Grann Brijit.
This gives Maman Brigitte an extraordinary relationship with sacred ground. She is not simply a spirit who happens to visit cemeteries. The cemetery is part of her spiritual identity.
She is a mother among the ancestors.
And here the parallel with Kildare becomes particularly evocative.
We cannot say Saint Brigid was the first woman buried there. History does not allow us to make that claim. But we can place the traditions beside one another.
At Kildare, the sacred woman is buried and her tomb becomes a focus of pilgrimage, devotion and sacred authority.
In Haiti, Brijit becomes the female spiritual authority of the cemetery itself.
Two very different religions. Two very different histories. Yet in both, a woman named Brigid or Brijit remains powerful beyond the grave.
Maman Brigitte, Mother of the Cemetery. An original House of Bridie artistic interpretation of the powerful Haitian Vodou lwa as guardian of the cemetery and protector of the ancestral dead. Within Vodou tradition, Brijit is intimately connected with graves, crosses, death and the passage between worlds — yet also with fierce protection, justice, sexuality and the enduring force of life in the presence of death.
“Maman Brigitte Comes From England”
And now we arrive at the mystery at the heart of this story.
A Haitian ceremonial tradition has been recorded in the words:
“Manman Brijit, li soti nan Angletè.”
“Maman Brigitte comes from England.”
For anyone researching Brigantia, those words are difficult to ignore.
Why England?
If the tradition simply said Ireland, Saint Brigid would seem the obvious point of comparison. But England directs our attention back towards Britain and towards Brigantia, whose worship is archaeologically attested across northern England.
We therefore find ourselves looking at a remarkable sequence of related names.
Brigantia in Britain.
Brigit in Ireland.
Brigid of Kildare.
Brigitte, the French form of Bridget.
Brijit in Haitian Creole.
And finally Manman Brijit of Haitian Vodou.
This is not proof of one uninterrupted goddess travelling intact across two thousand years. History is almost never that simple.
But neither can the pattern be dismissed as though there were no connection at all.
The names genuinely belong to the same linguistic family. British and Irish people really were present within the Atlantic world. Catholic saints travelled through European colonial cultures, and Haitian Vodou developed in an environment where African spirituality encountered European religious symbols and names.
Somewhere within that immense historical crossroads, a Haitian sacred figure named Brijit emerged.
Exactly why she was remembered as coming from England remains unresolved.
And perhaps that unanswered question is the most fascinating piece of all.
Did an echo of Brigid cross the Atlantic? The historical evidence cannot yet answer that question, but the mysterious tradition that “Maman Brigitte comes from England” continues to invite it.
The Irish and British Atlantic World
The possibility of cultural contact is not imaginary.
Irish people were present throughout the French Atlantic world, including Saint-Domingue. Irish merchant families settled in French ports such as Nantes and La Rochelle and became involved in Caribbean trade. Some acquired plantations in Saint-Domingue itself.
This history needs to be approached honestly.
A popular story sometimes claims that large numbers of “Irish slaves” transported devotion to Saint Brigid directly into Haiti. That description oversimplifies a far more complicated history.
Irish indentured servants certainly existed within the wider Caribbean, and Ireland endured profound colonial oppression. But European indentured servitude should not be treated as equivalent to the hereditary racial chattel slavery imposed upon Africans and their descendants.
Irish people also occupied many different positions within the Atlantic colonial world. Some were labourers and migrants; others became merchants, landowners and plantation owners, and some became directly implicated in the slave economy.
The real historical picture is therefore not a simple story of two enslaved populations exchanging religious traditions.
It is far messier.
But cultural contact absolutely existed.
People moved across the Atlantic. Languages moved with them. Saints moved. Stories moved. Songs moved. Names moved. Religious symbols entered new worlds and acquired new meanings.
It is within this enormous cultural movement that the mystery of Brijit needs to be understood.
Not a Celtic Goddess in Disguise
It is important that Maman Brigitte is not taken out of Haiti and transformed into a red-haired Irish goddess simply because that interpretation appeals to modern Western spirituality.
Vodou is a living religion, and Maman Brigitte belongs within it.
Modern Pagan and occult writing often portrays her as pale-skinned, red-haired and unmistakably Irish-looking. That image reflects the proposed connection with Saint Brigid, but it should not be mistaken for the only or definitive way Maman Brigitte is understood.
Haitian artists have represented her very differently. One particularly powerful example comes from André Pierre, one of Haiti’s most celebrated twentieth-century painters and himself a Vodou priest. His sacred paintings depict the lwa from within Haitian religious culture rather than through an external Celtic interpretation.
This matters because the strongest version of this story does not need to erase Maman Brigitte’s Haitian identity in order to explore possible European echoes.
Perhaps she is not a Celtic goddess in disguise at all.
Perhaps she arose at a crossroads where African ancestral spirituality, Catholic saints, European names, Caribbean history, resistance, survival and Haitian religious creativity encountered one another.
That possibility is, in many ways, even more extraordinary.
Modern imagery often portrays Maman Brigitte through an Irish or Celtic lens, while Haitian representations place her firmly within an Afro-Haitian sacred world. The contrast reveals how profoundly her image has continued to evolve.
Fire, Rum and Hot Pepper
Then we encounter something wonderfully characteristic of Maman Brigitte.
Fire.
Not necessarily the carefully tended sacred flame of Kildare, but fire that can be tasted.
Rum or clairin infused with hot pepper belongs to the ritual world associated with the Gede. Heat, alcohol, powerful sensation and irreverence all become part of a spirituality that deliberately overturns ordinary ideas about how people are supposed to behave in the presence of death.
This is why describing Maman Brigitte simply as promiscuous misses something much deeper.
The Gede are famously sexual, provocative and bawdy. Their songs, dances and humour can be deliberately shocking. Yet sexuality within this context is not merely about pleasure or promiscuity. It represents vitality itself.
Death has not defeated life.
The ancestors produced the living. The living will become the ancestors. Fertility and mortality are therefore bound together in one endless movement.
Maman Brigitte laughs amongst graves because the cemetery cannot silence life.
Her heat becomes another kind of sacred flame: passion, anger, protection, sexuality, justice and transformation.
Fire takes another form in the world of the Gede — heat, pepper, alcohol, passion and the irrepressible vitality of life beside death.
From Brigantia’s Spear to Brigid’s Flame
Once these figures are placed beside one another, something remarkable begins to emerge.
Brigantia carries the spear. She is connected with sovereignty, victory and protection.
Brigid carries the flame. Her traditions gather around healing, inspiration, poetry, craft, hospitality, renewal and sacred fire.
Maman Brigitte guards the grave. Her world encompasses ancestors, justice, sexuality, healing, fertility, death and transformation.
The spear, the flame and the grave belong to different religions and different historical worlds, yet each can be understood as a symbol of transition and power.
Perhaps these women should not be imagined as three incarnations of one goddess.
Perhaps the deeper connection lies elsewhere.
Again and again, the sacred feminine associated with this name appears at a threshold.
Brigantia stands between land and sovereignty.
Brigid stands between winter and spring, pagan memory and Christian sainthood, fire and water, inspiration and form.
Maman Brigitte stands between the living and the dead.
Each occupies a place where one state becomes another.
And perhaps that is why their stories continue to speak to one another.
The spear, the flame and the grave — three symbols of sovereignty, transformation and the sacred feminine standing at the threshold.
The Oak: A Connection Too Perfect to Invent
There is another connection frequently repeated in modern writing.
The oak.
Brigid’s relationship with the oak is deeply embedded within the Kildare tradition. The very name Kildare comes from Cill Dara — the Church of the Oak, preserving the memory of a sacred tree associated with her foundation.
Maman Brigitte is also sometimes described in modern spiritual writing as living within or beneath an oak tree.
The connection sounds perfect.
Perhaps too perfect.
During my research, I could not find sufficiently strong early Haitian evidence to establish the oak specifically as a traditional tree of Maman Brigitte. Other trees and cemetery vegetation appear in descriptions of her sacred landscape, but the oak connection seems much harder to substantiate.
That distinction is important.
Brigid already possesses a genuine and profound relationship with the oak. We do not need to manufacture the same association for Maman Brigitte simply to strengthen the theory.
The mystery deserves better than a convenient invention.
Brigid has her oak.
Brijit has her cemetery trees.
Both inhabit sacred landscapes in which the natural world touches the ancestral world, but they do not need to inhabit the same tree.
The oak belongs deeply to Brigid’s Kildare story — Cill Dara, the Church of the Oak. Claims that Maman Brigitte specifically inhabits an oak are much harder to substantiate and belong within the speculative rather than historical layer of this story.
When the Dead Return: Fèt Gede
At the beginning of November, Haiti enters one of the most powerful periods of its spiritual calendar.
Fèt Gede is the Festival of the Dead, a time associated with the Gede spirits, cemeteries and the ancestors. The major observances fall around the beginning of November, intersecting with the Catholic calendar of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days.
For anyone familiar with Celtic traditions, the timing immediately attracts attention.
Samhain occupies the threshold between October and November. All Saints’ Day follows on 1 November, and All Souls’ Day on 2 November. In Haiti, this same period becomes deeply associated with Gede and the ancestral dead.
Yet the traditions should not simply be collapsed into one another.
Fèt Gede is not Haitian Samhain.
Its roots belong to Haiti, African ancestral traditions, Catholic interaction and the development of Vodou. Samhain belongs to the Gaelic world.
Their histories are different.
And still there is something deeply evocative about cultures separated by an ocean turning towards death, ancestry and the unseen world at almost exactly the same moment of the year.
Standing within the Haitian cemetery at that threshold is a sacred woman named Brijit.
For anyone following the long journey of the name Brigid, it is difficult not to feel the resonance.
Fèt Gede in Haiti — a living tradition of honouring the Gede and the ancestral dead. Although its timing invites comparison with Samhain and European festivals of the dead, Fèt Gede belongs to its own Haitian religious world.
The Two Gates of Winter
There is another beautiful pattern that becomes visible when we look at the calendar.
At one end of winter we find Maman Brigitte and the season of the dead around the beginning of November.
Approximately three months later comes Brigid and Imbolc at the beginning of February.
One Brijit stands as darkness gathers.
The other Brigid appears as the northern world begins to turn slowly back towards light.
One tends the cemetery.
One tends the flame.
One reminds us that everything eventually returns to the ancestors.
The other reminds us that life begins again.
This is not an ancient teaching or a historical claim. It is simply a modern reflection that appears when the two traditions are placed beside one another.
Yet it is a beautiful one.
They become two Bridgets standing at two gates of winter: one accompanying us into darkness and remembrance, the other carrying the first light of renewal.
Two Bridgets at the gates of winter — Maman Brigitte amongst the ancestors as darkness gathers; Brigid carrying the returning flame of Imbolc.
The Cross, the Cemetery and the Sacred Threshold
Another symbol appears repeatedly within both worlds.
The cross.
The Brigid cross has become one of the most recognisable sacred symbols associated with Brigid in Ireland. Woven traditionally around her feast day, it carries layers of Christian devotion, folk belief and protection.
In Haitian Vodou, crosses appear throughout the sacred geography of the cemetery. They belong within the world of the Gede and the spirits associated with the dead, where Christian symbols have acquired distinctly Haitian meanings through centuries of religious transformation.
Maman Brigitte is sometimes represented with cemetery crosses or through titles associated with the cross, yet once again we should resist assuming that the resemblance automatically proves a direct historical connection.
What it does show is something more universal.
Crossroads, crosses, gates, graves and thresholds all mark places where ordinary boundaries become unstable.
And once again, Brigid and Brijit appear exactly there.
A Woman Who Refuses to Become Small
Perhaps the strongest connection between Brigantia, Brigid and Maman Brigitte is not a specific symbol at all.
It is character.
Each of these women resists the small and passive role that later cultures have so often tried to impose upon the sacred feminine.
Brigantia is armed and sovereign.
Brigid becomes the legendary founder and abbess of Kildare, associated with one of the most powerful religious institutions in early medieval Ireland.
Maman Brigitte commands the cemetery, curses injustice, embraces sexuality and refuses to approach death quietly.
They are not timid figures.
They occupy territory.
They protect.
They transform.
They speak with authority.
And perhaps that is the fiery thread that connects them most strongly.
Not a literal flame passed unchanged from one culture to another, but a recurring image of sacred feminine power that cannot easily be contained.
Warrior, flame keeper and Mother of the Cemetery — three radically different sacred women whose stories preserve an uncompromising vision of feminine power.
Did Brigid Cross the Atlantic?
And so we return to the question with which we began: did Brigid cross the Atlantic?
There is no surviving historical document that allows us to say that an Irish devotee carried Saint Brigid to Saint-Domingue and that she later became Maman Brigitte. There is no archaeological evidence establishing an unbroken line from Brigantia to Brigit to Brigid to Brijit, and there is no reason to remove Maman Brigitte from her African and Haitian spiritual context simply to make a Celtic theory work.
But neither is the mystery empty.
Brigantia really was worshipped in Britain, and her name really is linguistically related to Brigit. Brigid became one of the great sacred women of Ireland and one of Christianity’s most widely travelled female saints. British and Irish people participated in the Atlantic world, while Catholic saints and European names entered the cultural environment of colonial Saint-Domingue. Haitian Vodou itself emerged through extraordinary processes of religious survival, adaptation and transformation — and within that living spiritual world, a Haitian sacred figure called Brijit became one of the great female powers of the cemetery.
Most tantalising of all is the Haitian tradition that remembers the words:
“Manman Brijit, li soti nan Angletè.”
Maman Brigitte comes from England.
History cannot yet tell us exactly what those words mean. Perhaps they preserve a distant European memory. Perhaps the place-name changed as stories travelled, or perhaps Brigitte’s French Catholic name invited later explanations. It may be that several traditions collided and became inseparable over time — or perhaps we are simply looking for a single origin where none ever existed.
Religion does not always travel like a family tree, with one clean branch leading neatly to another. Sometimes it travels like water. It moves underground, disappears from view, meets other streams and emerges somewhere completely changed by the landscapes through which it has passed.
The Woman Who Survives Every Transformation
Perhaps this is why the journey of Brigid continues to fascinate me so deeply. Every age seems to change her, yet something recognisable continues to echo through the transformations.
Ancient Britain gives us Brigantia carved into stone, armed and victorious. Ireland remembers Brigit. Christian Kildare gives us Saint Brigid — abbess, healer, miracle-worker and sacred woman whose tomb drew pilgrims from across the land. The Atlantic world gives us another form of her ancient name, and Haiti gives us Brijit, Mother of the Cemetery.
These figures belong to different peoples, different religions and different moments in history, and we should never erase those differences simply because the similarities are compelling. Yet something continues to resonate between them: a powerful woman, a guardian, a healer, a protector, a keeper of thresholds, and a presence associated again and again with transformation.
At Kildare, Brigid’s tomb became a destination for pilgrims. In Haiti, Brijit commands the cemetery. Brigantia holds the spear. Brigid tends the flame. Maman Brigitte stands amongst the graves and refuses to allow death to be the final word.
Perhaps Brigid crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps she did not. Perhaps only her name crossed, carried through stories and memories with sailors, merchants, servants, migrants and priests. Perhaps African spirits encountered European saints and something entirely new emerged. Perhaps Maman Brigitte carries many histories rather than one.
We may never know.
But more than fifteen hundred years after Brigid’s death, and almost two thousand years after Brigantia’s name was carved into British stone, another sacred woman still stands beside the flame and the grave.
And she carries the name Brijit.
Across Britain, Ireland and Haiti, three sacred women carry related names through radically different worlds. Warrior. Saint. Cemetery Mother. History cannot tell us that they are one, but neither can it erase the extraordinary echoes between them.
A Note on History, Myth and Respect
Maman Brigitte belongs to the living religious tradition of Haitian Vodou. The proposed relationship between her and Saint Brigid, Brigit and Brigantia is fascinating, but it should not be presented as established historical fact.
The archaeological evidence for Brigantia is real. The linguistic relationship between Brigantia and Brigit is well recognised. Saint Brigid’s early cult and her magnificent tomb at Kildare are documented in early medieval sources. Maman Brigitte’s place within Haitian Gede spirituality and cemetery tradition is equally real.
What remains uncertain is exactly how — or whether — those worlds became directly connected.
Throughout this article, I have therefore tried to distinguish between historical evidence, living religious tradition and mythological interpretation.
Because acknowledging where history ends does not destroy the magic.
Sometimes that is exactly where the mystery begins.
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