I

• The external world is divided into sacred and non-sacred.
• Sacred includes good-sacredness (auspiciousness, purity) and bad-sacredness (inauspiciousness, impurity).
• The Kodagi term for ritual purity is madi, found in all Dravidian languages except Malayalam.
• The term for ritual impurity is polé, found in all Dravidian languages except Telugu.
• Polé is used in Kodagi to mean both general ritual impurity and specific forms, with prefixes like kurudu polé (blind pollution), tinga polé (monthly pollution), and petta polé or purudu polé (birth pollution).
• Pollution from death is called tīké, with tit meaning death-pollution in Tamil, and tit meaning faeces in Kodagi.
• A house where an adult has died is called tīké mané (polluted house) until the mourning ends.
• When mourning ends, a family friend declares, “Until now mourning, from now on festival” (indakané tammé inya pinya namme).
• In India, there is a ban on a member of a higher caste touching a member of a lower caste, especially where the structural distance between them is great.
• In Malabar and Coorg, this ban is elaborately systematized, with a required minimum distance to avoid pollution(TintJu pate).
• Amanisinacondition refers to ritual impurity in relation to a higher caste, while the higher caste is in purity towards a lower caste.
• Ritual purity and impurity maintain caste hierarchy. The Brahmin is pure in relation to all castes, while the Untouchable is impure to others.
• Untouchable castes include Poleyas, Holeyas (Kanna<;la country), and Pulayans (Malabar), all with terms for pollution in their names.
• Birth and death cause pollution in the okka (family group), with birth pollution being milder than death pollution.
• Menses result in ritual impurity for a woman for three days, after which she becomes pure with a bath on the fourth day.
• Formerly, women in an okka had to stay in an outhouse during their periods, keeping distance from others and avoiding the ancestor-shrine and cobra-platform.
• The cobra-deity was believed to be sensitive to defilement; if a woman approached the cobra-platform during her periods, the okka would incur the deity’s wrath.
• Coorg women no longer observe these period restrictions, unlike other parts of South India.
• Menses affect only the individual woman, but she must avoid touching others and staying away from sacred places on the ancestral estate to prevent harm to the okka.
• Ritual purity and impurity are related to the permanent features of social structure like caste and okka but also occur in non-structural contexts.
• A person, regardless of caste, is in ritual purity while praying or sacrificing to an ancestor or deity, achieved by actions like bathing and wearing ritually pure clothes.
• Contact with an ancestor or deity requires ritual purity.
• This principle extends to ritual mourning, where mourners offering food to the departed spirit are in ritual purity, even though their general condition is tīké, an extreme form of pollution until mourning concludes.

II

• Bodily emissions and waste matter are considered ritually impure.
• Sexual intercourse resulting in fluids from both partners is prohibited while in a ritually pure condition.
• Festival-priests at the Ketrappa festival must observe continence for twenty-one days, sleeping in the outer veranda, which women do not normally enter.
• A person in a ritually pure condition may not answer a call of nature; doing so results in impurity.
• Spittle is also ritually impure, and this is common throughout India, especially among the upper castes.
• A person may not touch their tongue or teeth with fingers; if they do, they must wash their hands.
• Elders discourage children from putting their fingers into their mouths, especially when cooking or serving food.
• In Kodagi, spittle is called tupnir, while objects touched by spittle are called enji.
• A person defiles their entire hand if they touch their tongue with their finger; this is prohibited, especially while cooking, serving food, or praying.
• If a finger that has touched the tongue contacts food, the entire dish becomes defiled, and no one can eat it.
• A Coorg folk-tale highlights the power of spittle, where brothers trick their sister into eating enji, leading her to lose her caste and become the deity of Poleyas.
• Nail and hair parings are impure and must be thrown far away from the house to avoid poverty.
• People rarely cut their own hair, as the barber’s touch defiles a Coorg; after being shaved, a person must bathe and change clothes, and the place where the barber worked is purified.
• Faeces, urine, semen, menstrual blood, spittle, and parings of nail and hair are all ritually impure.
• These impurities are incompatible with a condition of ritual purity, which requires bathing and wearing pure clothes.
• Dirt is identified with ritual impurity, and cleanliness with ritual purity, but they are ritual and not natural states.
• Birth and death result in ritual impurity for the entire household for several days, regardless of the number of baths taken.
• Once the prescribed period is over, the person attains normal ritual status after a bath.
• Ritual purity is different from cleanliness, although they often overlap.
• Ritually pure robes can be dirty, and snow-white clothes can be ritually impure.
• A corpse is ritually impure, and contact with it results in pollution.
• The crow, associated with death, is considered impure.
• The spirits of ancestors are believed to assume the form of crows during certain ritual occasions.
• After funeral rites, balls of rice are offered to the deceased spirit, and the arrival of crows to eat them indicates satisfaction.
• If crows caw on a roof, it is believed to presage death.
• Seeing two crows mating predicts death unless the person sends a false message announcing their death.
• If a crow’s droppings fall on a person, they must dip in a tank or river a thousand times, which is inconvenient.
• To ease the ritual, a person sits under a sieve while water is poured over them, effectively taking several baths at once.
• Rituals are often made more manageable through ritual mechanisms to reduce the inconvenience of following certain rules.