Face-covering.
Another device to avoid fascination or other dangerous influence is to cover the face so as to prevent the evil glance reaching the victim for whom it is intended. Thus, at widow marriages in Northern India, the bride and bridegroom are covered with a sheet during the rite, probably in order to avert the envious or malignant influence of the spirit of the woman’s first husband. It is in secret that the bridegroom marks the parting of the bride’s hair with vermilion. So in Bombay,[131] the Chitpâwan bride in one part of the wedding service has her head covered with a piece of broadcloth. The Ramoshis tie the ends of the bride’s and bridegroom’s robes to a cloth which four men of the family hold over them. The Dhors of Pûna put a face-cloth on the dead, which is a general practice all over the world. The same belief is almost certainly at the root of much of the customs of Pardah and the seclusion of women. It is as much through fear of fascination as modesty that women draw their sheet across the face when they meet a stranger in the streets. We come across the same feeling in the rule by which all doors were closed when the princess in the “Arabian Nights” went to the bath, and when not long ago the Mikado of Japan and other Eastern potentates took their walks abroad. We thus reach by another route the cycle of Godiva legends.[132]