Repetition of words

[oaken]

In the era before widespread clocks and watches, incantations also served as one of the few available methods of time keeping.

One Mississippix

Two Mississippix

Three Mississippix... ?

That would be a method that serves exclusively a time-keeping function. Whereas I was suggesting this is an additional function of incantations. I heard this point from an interview with one of the authors of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (where modern microbiologists reconstructed a thousand year old, effective, treatment for staph infection, whilst at the time not fully understanding how or why it worked). 

I agree with them that it would make much more sense to people writing their recipes down from a deeply religious and alchemical or magical world worldview to use prayers and incantations for a plurality of reasons, one of them being an in-culture way of measuring periods of time during a recipe (which included real chemical and biological time-sensitive reactions, as in the paper).

Whether this has anything to do with the vms is of course an entirely different question.