The sequence is remarkably stable across a thousand years and a very wide geography, which is why it can be described as a single rite at all. Participants wash and put on clean clothes and garlands. A procession forms and brings the animal, itself garlanded and sometimes with gilded horns, to an altar standing in the open air in front of a temple rather than inside it. A young woman carries a basket at the head of the procession; under the barley grains in it lies the knife, and the concealment is part of the form.
At the altar water is sprinkled, first on the participants and then on the animal, whose flinch or nod is taken as its assent. Barley grains are scattered from the basket by everyone present, so that the whole company has a hand in what follows. Hair is cut from the animal's forehead and thrown into the fire, the first irreversible act. The throat is then cut, upward for the gods of the sky. As the blood runs the women present raise a high ritual cry. The blood is caught in a bowl and poured over the altar, which is what makes the stone an altar rather than a table.
The butchery is public and immediate. The thigh bones are stripped, wrapped in fat and burned on the altar with a few token slivers of meat, wine and incense poured on; this is the god's portion and the smoke is the point of it. The inner organs are spitted and roasted quickly in the altar fire and eaten on the spot by the small group closest to the rite. Everything else is jointed, boiled in cauldrons and distributed, which is the part that takes the rest of the day.