the ceremonial life of the classical negera was as much a form of rhetoric as it was of devotion, a florid,boasting assertion of spiritual power. Leaping alive into flame (and, so it was thought, directly into godhood) was only one of the grander statements of a proposition that royal tooth filing, royal temple dedication, royal ordinations, and, in the puputans, royal suicides made in other, no less categorical way: there is an unbreakable inner connection between social rank and religious condition. the state cult was not a cult of the state. it was an argument, made over and over again in the insistent vocabulary of ritual,that worldly status has a cosmic base, that hierarchy is the governing principle of the universe, and that the arrangements of human life are but approximations, more close or less, to those of the devine.