As it happens, the author of the article just inexplicably cut out the transcript of doing the middle two steps, which are indeed necessary for the player to pe

As it happens, the author of the article just inexplicably cut out the transcript of doing the middle two steps, which are indeed necessary for the player to perform the ritual. It's possible that it would still be too fiddly for you, but modern parser-based text adventures have gotten a lot better since the Infocom days in this way. Probably the biggest reason is that games like Hadean Lands have dozens of beta testers play through it doing whatever their heart desires and providing feedback on puzzles and potential parser holes prior to an official release.