A Little Hocus Pocus

There’s at least one place where magic words have always seemed to
work—in the performances of entertainment magicians. Seventeenthcentury
wonder-workers were particularly fond of hocus pocus, which was
originally part of the larger incantation hocus pocus, toutous talontus, vade
celerita jubes. Like other pseudo-Latin incantations, the words mean
nothing, but they sound mysterious and were used by countless performers.
Hocus pocus was originally an entertainer’s phrase. Unlike abracadabra,
it never appeared on amulets or in spell books, but its origin is
a mystery. Some conjuring historians trace it to Ochus Bochus, the name
of a legendary Italian wizard. Another theory cites the Welsh hocea pwca,
meaning “a goblin’s trick.” It has also been suggested that hocus pocus is
related to the Latin hoc est corpus meum (“this is my body”), from the Roman
Catholic mass. This seems unlikely to many scholars, however,
since popular entertainers would hardly have risked offending the
Church—whose antagonism to magic of every sort was well known—
by borrowing “magic words” from a sacred service. About all we can
say for certain is that hocus pocus was in common use by the early seventeenth
century. The English playwright Ben Johnson reported a stage
magician calling himself Hokus Pokus in 1625, and the word appears
in the title of an early “how-to” magic book, Hocus Pocus Junior, published
in 1634. Today, many conjurors have dropped the use of magic
words altogether, and “hocus pocus” has come to mean, in a general
sense, trickery or deception. It may be the root of the English word
“hoax.”