What separates a srauta rite from the everyday worship of a Vedic household is infrastructure. The householder's domestic rites need one fire; the srauta system requires three, each with its own hearth, shape and function: the round garhapatya, the householder's fire from which the others are kindled, the square ahavaniya on which offerings ascend to the gods, and the crescent dakshinagni, the southern fire that guards against inauspicious powers. Around the fires works a priesthood divided by Veda.
The hotr recites the verses of the Rig Veda; the adhvaryu of the Yajur Veda performs the physical actions, measuring the ground, handling the implements, making the offerings, while muttering his prose formulas; the udgatr sings the melodies of the Sama Veda; and the brahman, the silent overseer, watches the whole for error and repairs it with expiations when it occurs. Larger rites multiply assistants until sixteen or seventeen priests are engaged. The offerings themselves range from milk, ghee and grain cakes through the pressed soma to, in the great historical rites, animal victims. The sacrificer, the yajamana, is a householder who commissions and benefits from the rite but performs almost none of it, an arrangement the tradition itself theorised: the priests lend him their expertise as the fires lend him their reach, and the texts debate for centuries what, in the end, the sacrifice actually accomplishes and for whom.