Absolutely - got a couple of points on this so get ready for those run-on sentences to make their return!
1- It’s easily overlookable in an occult practice, but there’s real validity in the concept of ‘blessing one’s food’. Having broken ties to Christian devotional religion years ago, imagine how bemusing it was to find instructions for essentially blessing water and food in Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics.
You may wonder, “what’s the damned point when you’re too enlightened these days to credit your continued existence to bearded white god in the sky?” Well, what does drive your existence then? If you’re a black magician, isn’t it, or doesn’t it become, yourself? Acknowledging this, gracefully taking a moment to “thank yourself” (lol, I know) and by taking stock of how your needs are met, -relaxing- more and -worrying- less (very important for sure) are just the basic benefits of taking these scant moments even before you charge the items with your energy the way it’s instructed in probably several places (but certainly IIH if you haven’t checked it out). Very basic, very easy, very empowering routine when you charge even your food and drink with health, life, and spirit! And once again to touch on the weird-seeming “thanking yourself” thing, the point of that is to reinforce your acknowledgement of yourself as the driving force in your world, the axis which the circle turns around. Like someone on this forum said Azazel told them, if you habitually act as though you are in charge, pretty soon the universe will follow suit - and it’s as true as it is badass!
2- Now for the strange one, and this is just a recent personal experience of mine so you can take it or leave it, but the possibilities are fucking tantalizing! I have an altar set up to Odin in my bedroom, and I make sure to keep a glass on it filled with a drink he approves of, usually homemade mead but sometimes whiskey (Odin is fond of Islay scotches). So when I got back from a stay in the desert several days ago, I made sure to refill the glass. I was drinking a scotch at the time, so I poured some of that for the camaraderie of ‘drinking together’. An important note for what’s about to happen is that I don’t really ‘consecrate’ my drink offerings to him. We have a good working relationship and he’s pretty much a permanent guest of honour in my home, so I consider him present and powerful enough to treat his own drink as he sees fit, there’s nothing done to it on my part except pouring it and whatever I happen to say as I do so (and often I’ll hang out and drink with the Allfather for a little bit).
So a couple of nights ago I was about to conduct my first ritual since getting back, and first I was going to have a word with Odin, and then a rune casting on the altar before actually going through with the ritual. After initial talks (if it has any bearing on this account, it was re-affirming that I’m past the point of asking him and his subordinates to do things -for- me, and I’m putting into action his lessons on standing on my own feet and doing things myself, the way living gods do; I was strictly asking for his advice as someone very wise who I had learned to trust implicitly, and for his blessing in casting the runes he discovered), I was struck by the conviction that sharing mead was now called for, so I grabbed a mason jar of the homemade stuff and poured a generous amount into the horn I hang near the altar.
Now at this point there was still scotch in Odin’s glass on the altar, but the feeling of rightness in replacing it with mead was very strong so I stated that I intended to -respectfully- drain the glass in order to replace it with the mean offering. There were no flashing warning signs in my head or otherwise, so I went through with it, toasted to Odin, Asgard and the gods, and killed the whiskey.
I’d drunk this whiskey in its mundane form countless times, but I’m convinced residing on my altar as an offering to Odin -changed- it and it was -not- mundane any longer. Don’t really know how to properly describe it. It was like drinking power, if that were a thing. It was a feeling of taking in all the aspects of Odin’s that I desired to master and embody, and I felt extremely close to the Hanged God in that moment and the shocked moments after. It was almost like a bizarre “Odinic Eucharist” if you’ll forgive the absurdity of the name. Like absorbing into myself some of the god’s own energy, in the form of a drink!
After this I poured mead into Odin’s glass, and kept some in the horn for myself as well as I began drinking with the man and outlining the premises of my planned ritual and then did consecrate the last draught in the horn to inspiration and insight from Odin. The mead, too, seemed “more” than it had ever been in any other setting, like on one physical level it was mead but on an invisible spiritual level it was some extremely powerful flow of energized intent that was working powerful changes ‘behind the scenes’ of the physical.
This mead seemed to bring utter clarity and “relaxed concentration” of my attention, and that stayed with me for the length of the rune casting I then engaged in. Also, without willing it of myself, while attuning to the bag of runes I found myself vocalizing the name “Ooooodddiiiiiinnnn,” in a strange half-singing resonant way. No way of knowing because chances are there’s no truly contiguous tradition, but that just might have been an instance of galdr! Either way, results are the ultimate arbiter and the results of my rune casting were completely appropriate and informed my subsequent ritual accordingly.
So here we actually have three different variations on the idea. The first that involves solely yourself, the second crazy one that’s like a dedicated drink “given back” to you to drink shooting you up with the attributes of the entity first dedicated to, and the third specifically consecrated to carry intent for a certain task or goal, in this case with the added firepower of a relevant entity but not of necessity I believe.
So yeah, a -very- valid concept from my experience anyway. Hope it was helpful, and if you got this far thanks for reading the novel!
Claidheam