The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it. Hocus was an old cunning attorney. – Dr. John Arbuthnot, History of John Bull, 1712. The words of consecration, “Hoc est corpus,” were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as “Hocus-pocus.” – John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 1874.
