You can no more know what a bade tower is (as we shall see, it is an axis mundi) without knowing what a cremation is than you can know what a catcher's mitt is without knowing what baseball is.
The state ceremonials of classical Bali were metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing conditions of life to be consonant with that reality; that is, theatre to present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it happen -- make it actual. The settings, the props, the actors, the acts the actors perform, the general trajectory of religious faith that those acts describe-- all need to be set against the background of what the devil was going on. And that background can only be perceived, and perceived in the same measure, as those theatrical components are perceived. Neither the precise description of objects and behavior that is associated with traditional ethnography, nor the careful tracing of stylistic motifs that is traditional iconography, nor the delicate dissection of textual meanings that is traditional philology are in themselves enough. They must be made to converge in such a way that the concrete immediacy of enacted theatre yields the faith enclosed within it.
Behind the tendentious dramaturgy of state ritual, then, and in fact behind the unchanging plot that animated it, lay two fixed conjunctions of imaged ideas. First, padmasana, the lotus seat (or throne) of god; lingga, his phallus, or potency; and sekti, the energy he infuses into his particular expressions, most especially into the person of the ruler. Second, buwana agung, the realm if being; and buwana alit, the realm of sentience; the "big world" of what there is and the "little world" of thought and feeling.
Surrounded by a swarm of related, ancillary ideas, also deeply sunk in the pomp and ornament which Helms describes, these two symbol packets formed the content of what is usually all too casually referred to as "divine kingship" in Bali. The message the negara was designed to convey, and in its ritual life did convey, is ill-described by the mere statement, correct enough in itself, that the king was a kind of corporeal god. To the degree that it can be abstracted at all from the vehicles of its expression, the message was that the king, the court around him, and around the court the country as a whole, were supposed to make themselves into facsimiles of the order their imagery defined.
Like dream symbols, religious symbols are richly polysemic (that is, have multiple senses), their significance spreading out profusely in an embarrassment of directions. And this is as true for Balinese religious symbols as for any in the world. They reek of meaning.
Literally, padmasana means "lotus seat." It is used to refer to the throne of the supreme god Siva (or Surya, the Sun), who sits unstirring in the center of a lotus (padma) surrounded on four petals to the north, east, west, and south by Wisnu, Iswara, Mahadewa, and Brahma, each associated with a particular color, day of the week, part of the body, weapon, metal, magical syllable, and form of supernatural power. It is used to refer to the small stone column, surmounted by a high-back chair (also of stone) set cater-cornered on the most sacred spot in Balinese temples, upon which offerings to the supreme god are placed during temple ceremonies, when, enticed out of one version of heaven into another by his dancing worshipers, he comes there to sit. It is used to refer to the posture, a kind of infolded squat, one adopts when meditating upon the divine. It is used to refer to the act and the experience of meditation itself. It is a coital position, it is the base of a lingga, it is one of the many names of the supreme god, it is an iconic picture of the cosmos, it is the receptacle upon which the remains of a high priest are conducted to his cremation. And it is the innermost reaches of the human heart.
Lingga is a symbol no less ramifying. Strictly, of course, it refers to Siva's phallus--the "marvelous and interminable" one by which he established his superiority over Brahma and Visnu. Beyond that, it refers to the rough-hewn stone representations of that phallus--mere oblong rocks, suitably rounded at the top--found in temples and other sacred spots all over Bali. More abstractly it is the prime symbol of divine kingship as such. Not only is the king referred to as the lingga of the world; but also, since "on earth, the ruler acts on behalf of Siva, and the essence of his royal power is embodied in the lingga [which] the Brahman . . . obtains . . . from Siva and hands . . . over to the founder of the dynasty as the palladium of his royalty," the image summarizes the deep spiritual connection (Hooykaas calls it an "indivisible trinity") between the supreme god, the reigning king, and the state high priest. The small, whisk like sprinkler made of grass stalks and plaited leaves from which priests shake drops of holy water over worshipers at the sacramental high point of practically all Balinese rituals is also addressed as a lingga. The kris(dagger) all noble personages wear thrust into the back of their sarongs, the crystal bar set into the ceremonial headdress of a high priest, the upper tip of a noble's cremation tower, the vehicle that transports the cremated soul to heaven, and the scaffold from which those widows throw themselves so dutifully onto their lord's pyre are also conceived to be linggas.