(29-09-2025, 03:34 PM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (28-09-2025, 10:01 PM)oaken Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.
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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.