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sister, so that the royal blood should pass unmixed on to his follower (opdat het vorstelijk bloed onvermengd op zijn opvolger zoude overgaan) (Korn 1932).

This value is expressed in ideas about twin births. The ideal ancestral progenitors are, twinlike, a unified male and his consort. In Balinese cosmology the gods marry in the most preeminent fashion: a husband-wife consort - brother-sister of the nearest kind, boy-girl twins. The legendary maharaja can practice brother-sister incest. But well formed ancestor groups actually practice nothing closer than firstcousin unions, and according to some provisos, as seen earlier, only the best brothers among them risk even this. Thus, cousin marriage appears to be a compromise between incest and out marriage. Patriparallel-cousin spouses are the most nearly incestuous approximation to the sacred Hindu consort motif that actual ancestor groups dare. An eldest son and his cousin consort maximize in their offspring the ancestral power (sakti) of their group as commemorated in its temple.

Balinese ancestor-group endogamy appears to be a series of flirtations with sibling incest. 'Mother'-son and at least real father-daughter unions are excluded from consideration by the principle of distinct, ranked generations; 'brother-sister' or same-generation incest is the ambivalent problem area, highlighted by the concern with twins. As a sacred lontar stipulates:
And so to be born with a wife is to be horn as a god, and the twin boy if he marries his twin may have only that one wife, like a god (cited in Belo 1935).
Further stipulations endow this incestuous spouse with sociological attributes by requiring she he reared at a distance from her consort; then, When they have reached the marriageable age, they are brought together and married one to another. It is hoped that if the legend conies true and the boy becomes king the wife will bring him power over the far-away land where she was reared, and all the land between (Belo 1935,my emphasis).

Thus, by means of a single symbolic woman - a geographically distanced, beloved twin-sister spouse - the triadic Balinese marriage system is here fancied as a whole. It is riot going too far to say that this ultimate consort symbolizes the unattainable unification of the diverse marriage preferences of our original diagram (Figure 1 endogamous, relatively incestuous, wives (Type C), wives of prearranged advantageous alliances (Type B), and individually desired wives adventurously fetched from outside (Type A).

This ideological scheme places ultimate value on the marriage of twins who first receive social attributes through separation (that is, each represents a different *kingdom) and then are reunited. The same idea turns up in the Panji cycle of Javanese court literature which has flourished in Bali for centuries. AS if echoing the concept of auspiciousness/disaster of twin births, Panji tales describe the sociocosmic disorder that prevails until lovers who resemble each other to the point of twinship are united and join their two distant kingdoms in fruitful alliance. In some versions, an ostensibly ideal first-cousin marriage (memisanan) is first shown to he inadequate,