The ceremonial life of the classical negara was as much a form of rhetoric as it was of devotion, a florid, boasting assertion of spiritual power. Leaping alive into flames (and, so it was thought, directly into godhood) was only one of the grander statements of a proposition that royal tooth filings, royal temple dedications, royal ordinations, and, in the puputans, royal suicides made in other, no less categorical ways: 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 and 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 divine.