Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and good luck, and any one else who sits there is likely to be plagued with haemorrhoids. When a woman in Central India dies after delivery her body is carefully removed, and an iron nail is driven into the threshold of every house which her body passes.[1] In North India when a man is suffering from stone in the bladder, he gets up very early in the morning, rolls seven times on his own threshold, eats a couple of radishes which have been exposed all night to the dew, and the cure is certain.[2]
When the poor souls of the dead wander about feeble and lonely till their funeral rites are done, they may be heard moaning and twittering on the ridgepole. Hence it is a place under taboo, and it is wise to protect it by setting up an old discarded earthen pot, decorated with a streak of whitewash. In Madras the ridgepole is worshipped while lying on the ground across two pieces of wood; it is decorated with flowers and garlands, and worship is done to it before it is placed in position.[3] In parts of Upper Burma the belief prevails that if a house be built without a ridgepole the inmates will be attacked by a tiger.[4] In pictures of houses among some tribes of Assam and Burma the beams forming the gables are prolonged into a fork, or a rude representation of something like the Cross of St. Andrew is made. In Lāhul the roof is surmounted by a ram's head, the symbol of creative power.[5] In some cases this has come to be purely decorative, but in its original form it serves as a protection against the Evil Eye and other spirit dangers.[6]
Similar protectives are those which the Nicobarese call
- ↑ Census Report Central India, 1911, 63.
- ↑ North Indian Notes and Queries, v. 178.
- ↑ Padfield, op. cit. 13.
- ↑ Gazetteer Upper Burma, part ii. vol. ii. 647.
- ↑ Rose, Glossary, i. 91.
- ↑ Journal Anthropological Institute, xi. 27, 64; T. C. Hodson, The Meitheis, 8.
