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.