incantation

noun

1. The act or process of using formulas and/or usually rhyming words, sung or spoken, with occult ceremonies, for the purpose of raising spirits, producing enchantment, or creating other magical results.

   “new years eve we dropped mushrooms / and danced around the house / making music with everything that we found / incantation replaced resolution”

2. A formula of words used as above.

   “My ancient Incantations are too weake, / And hell too ſtrong for me to buckle with:”

   “We did not know what scrambled eggs were, and we fancied that it must be some Red Indian or Sandwich Islands sort of dish that required dances and incantations for its proper cooking.”

   “Then he produced a string of beads, and after placing it over the scratchings he had made on the soil, jerked out some strange incantation in a voice that thickened and quivered with terror.”

   “It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night. The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics.”

   “Yarrow is one of the aboriginal English plants, and from time immemorial it has been used in incantations and by witches. Country folk still regard it as one of our most valuable herbs, especially for rheumatism.”

3. (slang)Any esoteric command or procedure.

   “The appropriate incantation of route is shown below; the gw keyword tells it that the next argument denotes a gateway.”

   “There's more than one command incantation to create an AVI. It's all a question of experimenting with the different audio and video codecs.”

   “Servers move from being special snowflakes to being disposable numbers on a list that can be created and destroyed without requiring someone to remember the specific incantation to make it work.”