It was shown me what the Preadamites were like, who were regenerated by the Lord and called "Adam": a certain one spoke with me in a speech not swiftly articulated, as speech usually is, but in the words there was little life, so that one can hear [from the speech] what kind of life. I heard him speaking when I awoke in the night. He had been put there to guard me, and he said that evil ones were trying to carry me off. I had heard that there was such a guard, and that he was not evil, but had little life left, so that he was an external person, yet in whom inner qualities were in the outer ones-but few inner qualities. So he had not become such an outer person as ours [today], in whom outer qualities are separated from inner ones. But there were inner ones with him, though few. This has now been made known to me, and I can now learn from it, and indeed from his speaking, that little of inward life remained. It was imparted to me verbally that the preadamites were of this nature, thus not evil. And it was also perceptively imparted that they related at that time to the hairs of the genitals. Whether this one was a preadamite cannot be known, because the preadamites [lived] so many centuries ago, and today there are very many such people. Otherwise there would not be any who would correspond to those hairs.