CATEGORY

Pura Besakih is the paramount Hindu temple on Bali Located high on the slopes of the volcano Mt Agung, it has developed over more than thousand years into great complex of 22 separate temples, the largest and central being Pura Penataran Agung. The annual cycle of more than seventy rituals, which symbolically link the temples into a whole, culminates in the hundred-year ceremony called Ekadasa Rudra (last held in 1979). The temple complex, state-supported at least since the fifteenth century,has undergone a series of architectural and ritual change.

This study combines an analysis of textual and historical sources with the field work methods of anthropology in creating a unified interpretation of this great temple.

David J. Stuart-Fox was educated at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University in Canberra. He is currently a librarian at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden