“HOCUS POCUS!” is a very old nonsense phrase that means “magic is happening”, but often in critical and disbelieving terms. Turns out, that phrase is quite old.
The first usage of “hocus pocus” on record comes from England in the 1620s to refer to magical conjuring, and as the century progressed, it increasingly was connected to charlatans pretending to do magic.
An English Archbishop of Canterbury named John Tillotson was the first to claim the origins of the phrase referred to a misunderstanding of an important phrase in the Catholic mass, when priests performed the sacrament of transubstantiation, which changed bread into the body of Christ. “In all probability, those common juggling words of hocus pocus,” he wrote on 1694, “are nothing but a corruption of ‘hoc est corpus'”, which translates “this is [my] body,” familiar words today in many Christian services.
Although it makes sense that people hearing the words “hocus pocus” might well have confused the Latin phrasing because they thought the priests were doing magic, Archbishop Tillotson was biased against the Roman Catholic Church, which by then had separated from the Church of England, conducting its services in the language of the parishioners. Unless we find more documentation, we will never know for certain if he was just making up this story or whether his etymological explanation is correct.
Source(s): @www.org.phrases.uk, aka “The Phrase Finder”.
