Story of Bali, Indonesia

house, which received several of the group's women in marriage. Members of the royal lines occasionally bring offerings to these shrines.
There are thrones for the deities of health, economy, and agriculture; their Hindu names are known, but it is the functions themselves that are stressed, since they represent official classical duties which are still professional specializations.
Another pedestal refers to a northern irrigation-headwater temple, and two small thrones receive the spirits from forest shrines erected by the group's ancestors when searching for the spring this temple commemorates.
In some respects the ancestor temple represents the ideal unity of its congregation. Its principle structures - the orchestra pavilion and entrance threshold - are maintained by al the women of the group equally. No offshoot temple can be built with a taller entrance, which would imply that it outranked this sacred ancestral source of legitimate members of the group where all cyclical and life-crisis rites culminate. In other respects the temple represents the internal differentiation of the group. Each collateral division is responsible for repairing different shrines. If one of several brothers receives a larger paddy inheritance, lie is likely to accrue heavier responsibilities for financing temple festivals. The ordinary adult male is concerned less with esoteric religious lore of the temples he supports than with his share of the upkeep and finances for ceremonies. Meticulous calculations to distribute fairly the practical monetary burden of maintaining an ancestor temple insure that a collateral division which claims higher prestige will have to pay for demonstrating it. The many thousand temples of 'the island of the gods' are not sustained by the fabled Balinese religiosity alone.