I have presented a picture of Javanese religion which conveys, I hope, both a sense of its complexity and of the intimate interrelations among its forms. As we have seen, each element in the kaleidoscope has its own distinctive hue, its characteristic tone, style, and manner. We began with the blandness and ambiguity of syncretic forms – the common denominators of village religion – and then considered, in successive chapters, the raucous banality and evasions of popular folk culture, the stifled quest for significance in cultic symbolism, the anxious literalism of Islamic ritual, the allusiveness and irony of mystical discourse, and finally the makeshift inventiveness of Javanese Hinduism. Each variant embodies – sometimes only suggests – a different conception of the world and one's place within it; and each gives voice to that conception in its own way. What brings them together is a common social context in which no single element can be fully comprehended without reference to the others. This is a structuralist insight, but it takes us beyond the purely formal; for, as we have seen, the complexity of cultural expression (evident in borrowing, ambiguity, avoidance, suppression, and irony) is closely tied to the exigencies of Javanese village life: the need for rukun, the privileged position of Islam, the reach of state power, and the latent threat of chaos.

In emphasizing the expressive differences between, say, Javanist mysticism and practical Islam, or between neighbouring spirit cults, my intention has not been to aestheticize Javanese religion, which would be to trivialize it, but to show how political and social tensions affect religious expression, variously shaping, stimulating, and muting it.