Red and Black are classified as hot colors, while green and white are cold colors.
Brenda Beck in her article "Color and Heat in a South Indian Ritual" first proposes the use of flower divination in South Indian temple. The ritual consists of a priest who throws six packets of flowers (three red hot, and three white cold) and divines the future of the subject for whom the ritual is being performed. Valentine Daniel [Daniel] performs an illuminating analysis of the ritual and shows how the ritual is designed to show the interplay between the kunam (actor) and karmam (action) complexes combine to provide a symbolic, and iconic and an indexical grammar of the ritual. This enables the flower ritual which uses the indexical and iconic relationship between the color red and a hot body state, the color white and a cold body state to respond to a wide varieties of questions about health and sickness.
Such metonymic clusters (through the iconic and indexical relationships) allow for the widely polysemous uses of the concepts of hot and cold in rituals and ceremonies. This allows the priest to use contextual and pragmatic factors making the actual interpretation somewhat flexible.