If speaking of Javanese paradoxes, we should certainly also remark that if the Sultan had ever attemped to put his wisdom to effect as a political leader, his charisma would have become burnished in some degree by the exercise of real power. It is only too easy for a ritual leader to become a repository of idealized hopes: it is precisely the function of ritual and symbol to express a ‘higher’ truth, free from imperatives of reification and risks of debasement in the world of mundane affairs. Be this as it may, the world of mundane reality in late Suhartoist Indonesia was one that was taunted by the purity of a Sultan-without-power, not one that was in a position to taunt the Sultan’s purity of a Sultan’s purity with accusations of pollution by association with itself. This was one element in the ideological or ideational climate in which the Suharto regime sought, in the end unsuccessfully, to perpetuate its ‘neo-monarchical’ tenure