When conducting this same Maligia ceremony for the ancestors in 1937, the famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson were the Kings guests, and there was, according to testimony, a brief philosophical exchange whereby the King pointed to the ocean – to which the spirits of the ancestors were carried to spread the ashes – as the place from which we all come, and to which we all must return. In short the ocean, holy and dreaded by the Balinese, symbolized Brahman, the all-encompassing God that resides in all.
|