messenger who had been selected by drawing lots every five years, that is a messenger chosen by himself. The role of this messenger was to act as a substitute of the king, and maybe of himself, and he was then ritually sacrificed by being tossed on the points of three spears held by several men. If the messenger died from being impaled, he was believed to have passed on to the afterlife, where he would live forever with . However, if the messenger survived, he was believed to be unworthy of addressing , and consequently was condemned to live the rest of his life in disgrace. A similar custom existed among ancient Iranian peoples, where spears were thrown at the messenger to sacrifice him. During this ritual, the messenger was a sacred king (the ritual killing of a sacral king was widespread in the ancient world), and death itself was the gateway which separated humans from the gods: and the messenger could only cross this gateway and achieve immortality by dying on the three spearheads, thus representing the hope of every Thracian to join . The Thracians propitiated the "Arean" with human sacrifice, just like their Scythian neighbours who performed human sacrifices to their own god of war. This practice of human sacrifice to war-deities is attested among various ancient Indo-European peoples including the Thracians, the Scythians, the Illyrians, the Celts, the Persians, and the Greeks: when the Apsinthii captured the Persian commander Oeobazus, according to their customs they sacrificed him to the warrior function of their god Pleistorus, that is to the local form of ; and before battle with Marcus Licinius Crassus in 29 BCE, the Moesi sacrificed a horse before their ranks and vowed to sacrifice all the enemies they would kill in battle and let the gods taste their entrails. The Thracians' practice of sticking the heads of their slain enemies in the points of their spears was also connected to the warrior-function of , especially to the depictions of the warrior in which he wears chain mail and is pointing his spear threateningly. Human sacrifices to the "Arean" were also performed to present kings as victors, or as pledges to the god in exchange of his protection. These human sacrifices also find parallels among the ancient Indo-Aryans in the form of the Purushamedha ritual, and similarly to how the Ashvamedha horse sacrifice was an alternative