The fragments of the Avesta which have been preserved do not give us very full information on the sacrifices. The essential matters are hymns of praise and prayers. The chief sacrifice is offered to one of the old deities, Haoma, the supporter and protector of life. When Plutarch represents the Magi as pounding a certain herb of the name of Omomi in a mortar, with invocations to avert Hades, he gives a correct account of the supposed tendency of this sacrifice. According to the Avesta the utensils for this sacrifice--the mortar, cup and bundle of twigs--were found in every house. The sacrifice consisted in the offering, _i.e._ the elevation of the cup filled with the juice of the Haoma, during the recitation of the proper prayers. Beside this offering, which even now is offered twice each day by the priests of the Parsees, the fire is to be kept up perpetually, and fed with good dry wood and perfumes. The flesh of the sacrifice (_myazda_) is not often mentioned; yet the book of the law provides that a thousand head of small cattle must be offered in expiation of certain offences,[279] and we are told in the invocations that the heroes of old time, from Thraetaona down to King Vistaçpa, had offered great sacrifices of animals to Ardviçura and Drvaçpa, in order to gain the victory, viz. 100 horses, 1000 cattle, and 10,000 head of small cattle. Herodotus tells us that the Magians, when Xerxes marched into Hellas, sacrificed 1000 oxen on the summit of Pergamus to Athene of Ilium, and at a later time white horses in Thrace; Xenophon maintains that the Persians sacrificed beautiful bulls to Zeus, _i.e._ to Auramazda, and horses to the sun, and burnt them whole; Athenæus tells that with the king of the Persians a thousand animals were daily slaughtered as sacrifices; camels, horses, oxen, apes, deer, and especially sheep. According to Arrian, the Magians who kept guard over the burial-place of Cyrus received a horse every month, and a sheep every day, for sacrifice.[280] Herodotus has already told us, that the animals were led to a pure place, and when the sacrificer had invoked the god were killed, cut up, cooked, and then laid out on delicate grass. The Magian then sang the theogony, and after some time, the person who offered the sacrifice "carried away the flesh, and used it at his pleasure" (p. 85). Herodotus is better informed than Xenophon; according to the Avesta only the head of the animal belongs to the gods.[281] Obviously, as the nature of the gods became more spiritualised--and the reform prepared the way for this--the sacrifice of animals was restricted in this manner, so that it consisted essentially in the offering of the animals, _i.e._ in the consecration of the flesh. We may conclude from the statement in Athenæus, that only consecrated flesh could be eaten at the court of the kings. Xerxes certainly would not have sacrificed to Athene, "a lying deity" of the Greeks, on the summit of Ilium; but he might very well have selected the last eminence in Asia Minor, "the many-fountained Ida," in order to offer there a sacrifice of 1000 oxen to Ardviçura for his victory beyond the sea--a sacrifice which corresponds exactly to the first offering made by Kava Huçrava and Kava Vistaçpa to the same goddess for victory over the Turanians.[282]