Agnihotra is the most frequently repeated of the Vedic fire offerings, performed at sunrise and sunset by a householder maintaining the domestic sacred fire, and its regularity is part of its religious point: where the grand srauta sacrifices were occasional and enormously resource intensive undertakings, agnihotra was meant as a continuous, twice daily discipline binding ordinary household life to cosmic order without interruption. The rite pours milk, and in some prescriptions other substances, into the consecrated household fire while Vedic verses are recited, an offering understood in Vedic ritual theology as sustaining a living link between the officiant, or the household as a whole, and the gods, and by extension as contributing to the maintenance of rita, the cosmic order the Vedic sacrificial system as a whole exists to uphold.
Vedic domestic ritual manuals, the Grihya Sutras, set out agnihotra's procedure and timing among the core obligations of a householder who has taken up the responsibility of maintaining a consecrated fire, a responsibility that, in the fullest classical vision of Vedic religious life, was expected to continue without a single day's interruption for as long as the householder lived, the fire itself passed down and tended as a family's enduring sacred possession.