…bathe in the stream of the tireless river, and alone, apart from the others, in dark robes, dig a round pit. In it slaughter a ewe, and lay it raw and whole on a pyre you have heaped well right over the pit.

The rite follows Homer. Mooney points to Circe's instructions to Odysseus before he calls up the dead: dig a pit, pour libations, sacrifice a ram and a black ewe (Odyssey 10.517–527). Here the offering goes to a goddess of the underworld, at midnight, from a man bathed and dressed in dark robes, as Medea was when she gathered the root (3.858, above). ἀδαίετον, "undivided," occurs only here. ὠμοθετῆσαι properly means laying raw pieces from the carcass on the altar (Odyssey 3.458); an offering to the gods below was burned whole, so Mooney finds the verb used loosely. Virgil's Aeneas does the same for the powers below, laying whole carcasses of bulls on the flames (Aeneid 6.253).