And what of the drink given to the gods? A "libation" for the gods, traditionally, is drink that is poured out onto an object or the ground, a sacrifice, and that may seem to be what Heidegger has in mind here: indeed he calls the drink for gods "Spende und Opfer", donation and sacrifice. A libation of this kind may even be what he has in mind—but the drink that is given to the gods need not be poured out in this way. Mortals may drink it, as they do in the sacrament of communion, in church: and then the wine, which is said to be "the blood of Christ", makes the god present to us. Yet, too often, it does so in only in abstract way, in which we are not opened up to divinity itself. In fact, the wine is most given over to divinity not in the formal communion of the church as such, but in the living communion of the feast among friends. Heidegger writes of the wine poured from the jug that it "stills the celebration of the feast into the high." Recall his saying that the δαίμονες are "the uncanny ones who present themselves in the ordinary": in the ordinary wine, the δαίμονες, die Göttlichen present themselves; they are the uncanny ones in that they awaken us to the uncanniness of the ordinary, the mystery of its being. Drinking wine when we eat together, if we will let it, calms and relaxes us on one hand and strikes us with the intensity of its flavour on the other; it can help to open us up to the presencing-to-us of the food, of the wine itself, and of our companions—it beckons us, "stilling" our inattentive activity, to the happening of being in the feast. The "offering" of the wine is an offering of ourselves—in the wine which Heidegger describes as given over to the god, we give ourselves over to divinity, to the mystery that Es gibt Sein.

Die Göttlichen in the Fourfold

¶ 8:24 PM