Sheaves.
Most grains in the ear have also mystic uses. It is hung up over the house door to repel evil spirits, and in Hoshangâbâd they tie a sheaf of corn on a pole and fasten it to the cattle shed as a preservative.[69] The combination of seven kinds of grain, known as Satnaja, is an ingredient in numerous charms and is used in many forms of worship.
Milk.
So with the products of the sacred cow, which are, as might have been expected, most valuable for this purpose. Hence the use of Ghilor or clarified butter in the public and domestic ritual. Milk for the same reason is used in offerings and sprinkled on the ground as an oblation. Cowdung, in particular, is regarded as efficacious. After the death or birth impurity the house is carefully plastered with a mixture of cowdung and clay. No cooking place is pure without it, and the corpse is cremated with cakes of cowdung fuel. Even the urine of the cow is valued as a medicine and a purificant. The cow guards the house from evil, and every rich man keeps a cow so that his glance may fall on her when he wakes from sleep, and he regards her as the guardian of the household.
Colours.
Colours, again, are scarers of evil spirits. They particularly dread yellow, black, red, and white. The belief in the efficacy of yellow accounts for the use of turmeric in the domestic ritual.[70] A few days before the marriage rites commence the bride and bridegroom are anointed with a mixture of oil and turmeric known as Abtan. The bride assumes a robe dyed in turmeric, which she wears until the wedding. The marriage letter of invitation is coloured with turmeric, and splashes of it are made on the wall and worshipped by the married pair. In the old times the woman who performed Satî, and nowadays married women who die, are taken to the pyre wrapped in a shroud dyed with turmeric. The corpse is very often smeared with turmeric before cremation, a custom which is not peculiar to the so-called Aryan Hindus, because it prevails among the Thârus, one of the most primitive tribes of the sub-Himâlayan forests. The same principle probably explains the use of yellow clothes by certain classes of ascetics, and of Chandan or sandal-wood in making caste marks and for various ceremonial purposes.
Yellow and red are the usual colours of marriage garments, and the parting of the bride’s hair is stained with vermilion, though here the practice is probably based on the symbolical belief in the Blood Covenant. The same idea is probably the explanation of the flinging of red powder and water coloured with turmeric at the Holî or spring festival.