h • Unscientific "[H.P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled] covered everything from magic and psychic powers to ancient races, secret teachings, and Hindu philosophy. Its basic premise was that the occult is not hocus-pocus but a true science, based on profound knowledge of the secrets of nature, lost to modern humanity but known to the ancients and to a few highly evolved human beings." -- Gary Lachman, A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (2005) • Witchcraft -- Eugene H. Peterson, The Message Remix (200 ) -- Ngaire E. Genge, The Book of Shadows: The Unofficial Charmed Companion (2000) Origins: In a fifteenth-century German-Jewish manuscript, a magical formula of mystical names is spelled out. "One of the incantations in it . . . contains the names 'Akos Pakos,' the earliest literary occurrence of the terms which, with slight orthographic variations, have become the hallmark of pseudo-magic in a dozen European tongues -- our Hocus Pocus. It is known in European literatures only since the beginning of the seventeenth century. The origin of the term is uncertain -- it has been claimed as of both Jewish and Christian derivation -- but whatever its origin there is no doubt that it has been preserved for us by German Jews."21 Some scholars trace the origin of hocus pocus to the Welsh phrase meaning "a goblin's hoax": hovea pwca (the w in Welsh being a true "double u," pronounced oo). Hocus pocus may also have evolved from the name of a mythological sorcerer in Norse folklore, Ochus Bochus. Medieval Italian performers appealed to a legendary Italian wizard, also known as Ochus Bochus, for help with their illusions. This wizard's name was misspelled by a German author as "Hogges and Bogges."24 A great many people mistakenly assume hocus pocus is a corrupted Latin phrase from the Roman Catholic Eucharist: hoc est enim corpus meum ("this is my body"), in which a wafer is transformed into the body of Christ through the mystery of transubstantiation. This controversial speculation is attributed to John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1694 , and is generally considered to be a baseless "polemic against the Catholic notion . . . of transubstantiation."27 The Oxford English Dictionary has associated hocus pocus with a mock-Latin nonsense phrase: hax pax max Deus adimax. However, Victor 21 Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition (19 9) Wikipedia 2 David Louis, 2,201 Fascinating Facts (198 ) 24 Cathleen Ann Steg, "Focus on Hocus Pocus," Scouting, Sept. 2001 25 "The highest drama of the week was ushered in by uttering that secret, sacred phrase that, when it reverberated around the massive nooks and crannies of medieval cathedrals, sounded more like 'hocus-pocus' than 'hoc est corpus meum.'" -- Leonard I. Sweet, A Cup of Coffee at the Soul Cafe (1998) 26 Michael Quinion, "Hocus Pocus," WorldWideWords.com 27 LaputanLogic.com