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Hocus   Listen
verb
Hocus  v. t.  
1.
To deceive or cheat.
2.
To adulterate; to drug; as, liquor is said to be hocused for the purpose of stupefying the drinker.
3.
To stupefy with drugged liquor.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hocus" Quotes from Famous Books



... all With what he did say, would buy many horses. Though nowadays he's not so much for women: "So few of them," he says, "are worth the guessing." But there's a work at work when he says that, And while he says it one feels in the air A deal of circumambient hocus-pocus. They've had him dancing till his toes were tender, And he can feel 'em now, come chilly rains. There's no long cry for going into it, However, and we don't know much about it. The Fitton thing was worst of all, I fancy; ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... the stomach-ache; and the pastern-bone of a hare is an infallible remedy for colic, provided, first, it be found in the dung of a wolf, second, that it docs not touch the ground, and, third, that it is not touched by a woman.[45] Another cure for colic is effected by certain hocus-pocus with a scrap of wool from the forehead of a first-born lamb, if only the lamb, instead of being allowed to fall to the ground, has been caught by hand as it dropped from its dam.[46] In Andjra, a district of Morocco, the people ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... and it was deduced also that the Conservatives were in their hearts as angry as were their opponents. What was to be gained but the poor interval of three months? There were clever men who suggested that Mr. Daubeny had a scheme in his head—some sharp trick of political conjuring, some "hocus-pocus presto" sleight of hand, by which he might be able to retain power, let the elections go as they would. But, if so, he certainly did not make his scheme known to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... Rufus. His voice was shaky, and if there had been light enough to see it, his face was gray with terror of his own hocus-pocus. The cat's head had dropped out of the line of sunlight, and she had coiled herself up on the dresser among a disorderly litter of crockery ware. Dick, relieved from the fascination of her too-visible ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray

... ma'am," said Kantwise, "only this, you know, if I hocus you, why you hocus me in return; so it isn't ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... indulgence and forbearance towards this plea: besides, before the time of re-election comes about, these inconvenient scruples may, in the din of new contests, be forgotten, or remembered only to be forgiven, and, by the hocus pocus of party, even metamorphosed into a recommendation. When, then, it is so easy to take shelter behind the ark of the constitution, ought we to enlarge the limits of this place of ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... perhaps ten pounds would do—- that, and a pint of wine. I have a bottle of inky-pinkie in my pocket. (Approaches Goloshan.) By the hocus-pocus and the magical touch of my little finger; heigh ho! start up, Jack, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... ill—What do I care about the theatre? What do I care about the spasms of its moral ecstasies in which the mob—and who is not the mob to-day?—rejoices? What do I care about the whole pantomimic hocus-pocus of the actor? You are beginning to see that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart. For the stage, this mob art par excellence, my soul has that deepest scorn felt by every artist to-day. With a stage success a man sinks to such an extent in my esteem as to ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... with her, and a very considerable advance towards insanity on hers by falling in love with him. But perhaps this give-and-take of lovers may seem attractive to some. And when after a time we get into mere hocus-pocus, and it seems to Consuelo that Albert's violin "speaks and utters words as through the mouth of Satan," the same persons may think it fine. For myself, I believe that without fatuity I may claim to be, if not a visionnaire (perhaps that also), at least a lover of visions, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... fellows up as a kind of bogey. For years they've been teaching the natives that a red-coat is a kind of sacred monkey that all must bow down to. And you forget you're only a man like the rest of us. When you meet a man who isn't scared off by all this hocus-pocus it comes pretty hard on you. You have to sing ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... teach them how to boil their yellow meal, on which subject he had a theory totally opposite to the practice of the woman employed at the soup-kitchen. "Av we war to hocus it that, yer riverence," said Mrs. Daly, turning to Mr. Townsend, "the crathurs couldn't ate a bit of it; it wouldn't bile at all, at ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... "Oh, there's some queer, hocus-pocus business on foot," muttered Hal, bitterly. "But I don't believe Jack feels much like telling us anything about ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham

... Beatrice went on. "This Bentwood is a doctor who is an expert in the miracles and the hocus pocus of the East. The drug they administered to you is not known in England; the thing has never been seen here. I understand that they could have kept you in a state of suspended animation as long as they pleased. But they desired to ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... What hocus-pocus I must seem to be talking, as if there were some cheap tragedy in my life. Indeed there is nothing of the sort. I have lived as tamely as a house-cat, my only escapade having been an innocent attempt at playing Timon for a couple ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call superstitious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in this world has been determined ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... step toward the monk; peremptorily) Enough now! Stop your hocus-pocus. You have played your trick. Now stop, or I'll knock all that jugglery out of ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev

... it should be said of him that he was far-and-away the cleverest of his party. He knew himself to be clever. But he could only be far-and-away the cleverest by saying and doing that which no one could understand. If he could become master of some great hocus-pocus system which could be made to be graceful to the ears and eyes of many, which might for awhile seem to have within it some semi-divine attribute, which should have all but divine power of mastering the loaves and fishes, ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... find rudimental organs and similarity of plan, because it has pleased the Creator to set before Himself a "divine exemplar or archetype," and to copy it in His works; and somewhat ill, those who hold this view imply, in some of them. That such verbal hocus-pocus should be received as science will one day be regarded as evidence of the low state of intelligence in the nineteenth century, just as we amuse ourselves with the phraseology about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, wherewith Torricellis compatriots were satisfied to explain ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... mega mar, hocus the baldmare has cantedme ontoss; * Philladram sukami, some Spirit offerme to suckon. Dear Hokey behasty, forbum sufferssore by a Thumpon't; No baldmare my Gammon ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)

... you in anything. What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible,—that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that. No subtlest hocus-pocus of "reason" versus "understanding" will avail for that feat;—and it is terribly perilous to try it in ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... fair warning" mused Mr. McGraw, as he reread this document. "I defy any man to look between the lines and scent my hocus- pocus game." ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... Baker is not a name to be ashamed of, and if you think that by any of your underhand hocus pocus you can trespass on my premises and prevent my caring for my own property ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... tho' a deal has been said, Yet a little, we doubt, to the purpose, As when "hocus pocus" was jargon'd instead Of the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... paid, notwithstanding importuners had frequently intimated that a place called the gaol was not far distant, and that the squire's office was within a stone's throw of "the corner." Colonel M'Carstrow, reports say, had some years ago got a deal of money by an unexplainable hocus pocus, but it was well nigh gone in gambling, and now he was keeping brothel society and rioting away his life faster than the race-horses he had formerly kept on the ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... HAVE lived in the country. I thought maybe you was trying to hocus me again. What's your real ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man, and his country the primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is not a skull of average ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... which we were outspanned, I took off my shirt to have a good wash, still chuckling at the memory of all the hocus-pocus of my ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... some of these women get along. Very few make over two dollars a week, and some never go beyond a dollar. Many of them are mothers, and most of them have some one or more dependent upon them. Food, rent, clothes, and fuel, all have to come out of these small earnings By what hocus-pocus it is done, I must confess, puzzles me ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur

... is put right as far as possible. A warm at the sanctum's fire diminishes the purple in Miss Parkington's cheeks; and the maid, by some hocus-pocus peculiar to her craft, again inflates Miss Waters into a balloon, and stitches up Miss Brindle's flounces and "gathers." The ladies join their respective gentlemen, who have been cooling their toes and uttering warm anathemas in the hall; and the party sail, arm-in-arm, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... aes triplex. I disposed of the snake, put out the gas; and down we three sat, amid profound darkness, like three male witches in "Macbeth," having previously locked the door to prevent any one disturbing our hocus-pocus. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... to himself, in order to damp his too certain expectation for a conviction. Now it needed not repetition, for it forced itself upon his consciousness, and he seemed to KNOW, even before the jury retired to consult, that by some trick, some negligence, some miserable hocus-pocus, the murderer of his child, his darling, his Absalom, who had never rebelled—the slayer of his unburied boy would slip through the fangs of justice, and walk free and unscathed over that earth where his son ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... things explained, any more'n Abe here! You prefer hocus-pocus. And nothin' will teach you. Take Rhody! Sees Michaelis flunk his job miserable. Sees Mary go down like a woman shot, hands and legs paralyzed again,—Doctor says, for good, this time. And what does the girl do about ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody

... the girls!" he put in (his ears evidently are as sharp as mine); "the inquiries having proceeded from Franklin, it was only natural for me to suspect that he was trying to mislead us by some hocus-pocus story. So I visited the girls. That I had difficulty in getting to the root of the matter is to their credit, Miss Butterworth, seeing that you had made ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green

... beat it quick. But the old mule isn't going to move one step without that trial. He's fled back to his cell and stands there as dignified as if he was going to lay a cornerstone. He's a grave rebuke to the whole situation, as you might say. Then the Judge and Cale go through some kind of a hocus-pocus talk, winding up with both of them saying 'Not guilty!' in a loud voice; and Myron says to Pete: 'There! You had your trial; now get out of my ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass and Sam repaired to the "Peacock." They all first dined together at the "Town Arms" and arranged to reassemble there in the morning. It was here the barmaid was reported to have been bribed to "hocus the brandy and water of fourteen unpolled electors as was a stopping in the house," and where most of the exciting scenes of the election either took place, or had their rise ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz

... than a million of maggots could have done in three weeks. After cheese comes nothing; then all we desired was a clear stage and no favour; accordingly everything was whipped away in a trice by so cleanly a conveyance, that no juggler by virtue of Hocus Pocus could have conjured away balls with more dexterity. All our empty plates and dishes were in an instant changed into full quarts of purple nectar and unsullied glasses. Then a bumper to the Queen led the van of our good wishes, another to the Church Established, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... Andrew Ferrary, in single combat; whereupon, as might reasonably be expected, he would, in the twinkling of a farthing rushlight, fall down as dead as a bag of sand; yet, by their rictum-ticktum, rise-up-Jack, slight-of-hand, hocus-pocus way, would be on his legs, brushing the stour from his breeches knees, before the green curtain was half-way down. James Batter himself once told me, that, when he was a laddie, he saw one of these clanjamphrey go in behind the scenes ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... the last drop, with all the horrors and delights that may lie hidden at the bottom of it. Just as it is our evident duty every day to commit every good deed and every rascality lying within our capacity.... No, I won't let you rob me of my death moments by any kind of hocus-pocus. It would imply a small-minded attitude, worthy neither of yourself nor of me.—Well, Felix, the twenty-sixth of November then! That's still seven weeks off. In regard to any formalities that may be required, you need have no ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler

... have no retainers but two, whose common names were Hocus and Pocus, but as he hated the use of common names and as no one had heard of Hocus' lineage (nor did he himself know it) he called him, Hocus, "Freedom" as being a high-sounding and moral name for a footman and Pocus (whose name was of an ordinary decent kind) he called "Glory" as being a ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... with a vague, nameless fear. Forty years he wears the mysterious thing, dies and is buried with it, and in all that time they never have a glimpse of his face. Though there is a deal of nonsense in the story, and a hocus-pocus instead of a mystery, we must remember that veil as a striking symbol of the loneliness of life, of the gulf that separates a human ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... justified in believing either that one's senses were deluded, or that one had not really got to the bottom of the phenomenon. Of course, if one could vary the conditions, if one could take a little silex, and by a little hocus-pocus a la crosse, galvanise a baby out of it as often as one pleased, all the philosopher could do would be to hold up his hands and cry, "God is great." But short of evidence of this kind, I don't mean to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... that these things are but trifles to the Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists, who profess to project their astral bodies, and play many other hocus pocus tricks of transmitting voices and articles to immense distances. They may therefore be able to explain these phenomena, I cannot; still I have the belief that there is some spirit-force which can and does act as a medium ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... woman, and afraid of the ship's losing reputation while he was in charge, told them all to be good boys and he would speak to the Captain when he came aboard; and served them out three fingers of rum apiece, which the bo'sun took upon himself to hocus. By latest accounts, they're sleeping it off and—I say, waiter, you might tell the cook to ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... all this hocus-pocus about the ha'nt, that is easily explained. He needed a scapegoat on whom to turn the blame when the bonds should disappear; so he and this Cat-Eye Mose between them invented a ghost. The negro is a half crazy fellow who from the first has been young Gaylord's tool; I don't think he ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster

... sea-level, with abundance of wild grapes and other fruits, yams, nuts, flax, tobacco, etc.; but the travelling was difficult owing to the high grass. The people are pleasant-featured and good-natured, and the chief, Katchiba, maintains his authority by a species of hocus-pocus, or sorcery. He is a merry soul, has a multiplicity of wives—a bevy in each village—so that when he travels through his kingdom he is always at home. His children number 116, and the government is quite a family affair, for he has one of his sons ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... may practise an hundred delicious things to please your appetites, & do as many Hocus Pocus tricks more. Now you may outdo Aretin, and all her light Companions, in all their several postures. Now you may rejoice in the sweet remembrance, how sumptuous that you were, in Apparel, meat and drink, and all other ornaments ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... privileges, candles, bells, votive tablets, and churches, but say that a Christian life consists in faith and love. Let us keep this up for two years and you will see where pope, bishop, monks, nuns, and all the hocus-pocus of the papal government will be; it will vanish away like smoke." God, Luther urged, has left us free to choose whether we shall marry, become monks, fast, confess, or place images in the churches. These things are not vital to salvation, and each may do ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... What was it that LEDEBOUR said of it? Did he not describe it as "a political hocus-pocus"? Such men ought to be at once taken out and shot. But we Prussians have always been too gentle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various

... Jonas Billings from the crowd. "Chinese dukes, eh! What's it all about?" "Reg'lar hocus-pocus," remarked the vagabond brother of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... mutual change.] Interchange — N. interchange, exchange; commutation, permutation, intermutation; reciprocation, transposition, rearrangement; shuffling; alternation, reciprocity; castling (at chess); hocus-pocus. interchangeableness^, interchangeability. recombination; combination &c 48. barter &c 794; tit for tat &c (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... longer have said. He thought he worshiped the truth, but he did not. He knew that the truth was everything, but a lie came that seemed better than the truth. In his soul he knew he was not acting truly; that had he honestly loved the truth, he would not have played hocus-pocus with metaphysics and logic, but would have made haste to a manly conclusion. He took the package, and on his way to the dining-room, dropped it into ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... presence. Never did he show the slightest fear of us or of anything, but he was unwearied in his efforts to regain his freedom. After a few days we put a strap upon his neck and kept him tethered by a chain. But in the night, by dint of some hocus-pocus, he got the chain unsnapped and made off, and he is now, I trust, a patriarch of his tribe, wearing ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs

... of gray bulls as hocus-pocus would be to describe a puzzling situation much too subjectively, since the Government has apparently no evidence that these are not genuine prophecy. The best the Government can do is to call them ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... poor Sister is quite harmless;" and Valguanera rose, stretching himself. "My servants say she wants a mass said over her, or something of that kind; but I haven't much love for such priestly hocus-pocus,—I beg your pardon" (turning to me), "I had forgotten that you were a ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... three steps. He recalled the expression on Eleanore's face during the performance of the symphony; his greedy eyes had rested on her all the while. He became enraged: "You don't imagine that progress can be made by such amateurish efforts?" he said with a roar. "It is all hocus-pocus. There is as a matter of fact no such thing as progress in art, any more than there is progress in the course of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... mounted volunteers under command of Colonel James W. Nesmith—subsequently for several years United States Senator from Oregon. The whole force was under the command of Major Rains, Fourth Infantry, who, in order that he might rank Nesmith, by some hocus-pocus had been made a brigadier-general, under an appointment from ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... coast in a campaign, and no one would ever interfere to disturb us. Why should they? The Turks could not, and the natives of Fran-guestan would not. Leave me to manage them. There is nothing in the world I so revel in as hocus-sing Guizot and Aberdeen. You never heard of Guizot and Aberdeen? They are the two Reis Effendis of the King of the French and the Queen of the English. I sent them an archbishop last year, one of my fellows, Archbishop ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... must have been fatal to the Whigs; they, therefore, very dexterously adopted a small minority of the nation, consisting of the sectarians, and inaugurating them as the people with a vast and bewildering train of hocus-pocus ceremonies, invested the Dissenters with political power. By this coup-d'etat they managed the House of Commons, and having at length obtained a position, they have from that moment laid siege to the House of Lords, with the intention of reducing that great ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli

... a session devoted merely to ways and means. But she's not saying hocus-pocus and stirring caldrons on his account, you may be certain. She admitted that he ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham

... a laugh to raise! Pray don't be so fastidious! She But as a leech, her hocus-pocus plays, That well with you her potion may agree. (He compels ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... Nicholas Frog, and Lewis Baboon, who spent all they had in a Law-suit." For Law put War—the War of the Spanish Succession; for lawyers, soldiers; for sessions, campaigns; for verdicts, battles won; for Humphry Hocus the attorney, Marlborough the general; for law expenses, war expenses; and for aim of the whole, to aid the Tory policy of peace with France. A second part followed, entitled "John Bull in his Senses;" the third part was called "John Bull still ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot

... it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me that he could not long endure such an influence. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... further on. In all probability, the industrial school, in the course of the year, will receive a fraction of this money—perhaps even so large a fraction as one half. It may be that, ere now, some obliging person about the City Hall has offered to buy the claim for $1000, and take the risk of the hocus-pocus necessary for getting it—which to him ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... sure at the time, but it was now revealed to him that when he had urged Malvina to test her strength, so to express it, on the unfortunate Mrs. Arlington, it was with the conviction that the result would restore him to his mental equilibrium. That Malvina with a wave of her wand—or whatever the hocus-pocus may have been—would be able to transform the hitherto incorrigibly indolent and easy-going Mrs. Arlington into a sort of feminine Lloyd George, had not really entered ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome

... particularly anxious to meet Acton, for Phil, in the holidays, had given Jack a pretty correct inkling of Acton's character, and he began to see—in fact, he did see—that Raffles and the shooting and the billiards, and the hocus pocus of "hedging on Grape Shot," and the trip to London, etc., was only one involved, elaborate plot to strike at Phil. Jack now fully realized that he had played a very innocent fly to Acton's consummate spider, and he now, when there wasn't ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson

... does Comstockery conjure decency into the stomach and indecency into the bowels? But how rejoiced we should be that it is no worse than indecent to speak of the receptacle of the intestines by its common name. By some hocus pocus of which Comstockery is easily capable it might have been obscene to speak of the digestive process or of any of the digestive organs. We might easily have been taught that digestion was a moral matter, not to be talked of, not to be studied; ignorance of which was a virtue, knowledge of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... see the words on the roll, the roll that wasn't, as though they were engraved on his eye-retinas: As a beginning, and to prove this isn't just a bit of hocus-pocus, one of the people at your Center is due to leave ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking

... throne of God. The things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian things—the abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly "innocence" that was Greek. If he was ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... only done to smoke us; Don't be so serious, my man! She must, as Doctor, play her hocus-pocus To make the dose work better, that's the plan. [He constrains FAUST ...
— Faust • Goethe

... sake will greatly accelerate and aggravate the decomposition of the Democratic party in this State," said the Tribune. "That process was begun long since, but certain soft-headed quacks had thought it possible, by some hocus pocus, to restore the old ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... follow, Tashmu proclaimed that he would pass that night in Wizard's Glen, where, by invocations, he would learn the divine will. At sunset he stalked forth, but he had not gone far ere the Mohawk joined him, and the twain proceeded to Wahconah Falls. There was no time for magical hocus-pocus that night, for both of them toiled sorely in deepening a portion of the stream bed, so that the current ran more swiftly and freely on that side, and in the morning Tashmu announced in what way the Great Spirit would show his choice. Assembling the tribe on the river-bank, below a rock that ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... valuable mineral on earth is mud. Diamonds and rubies are just nowhere by comparison. I don't mean weight for weight, of course—mud is 'cheap as dirt,' to buy in small quantities—but aggregate for aggregate. Quite literally, and without hocus-pocus of any sort, the money valuation of the mud in the world must outnumber many thousand times the money valuation of all the other minerals put together. Only we reckon it usually not by the ton, but by the acre, though the acre is ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... hocus-pocus side of the case," he replied, "turns on matters Egyptian, doesn't it? Very well. Who else, that we know about, is associated, or ever ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... diabolical. Indeed, considering that Stirn always suspected the Papisher of having had a hand in the whole of that black and midnight business, in which the stocks had been broken, bunged up, and consigned to perdition, and that the Papisher had the evil reputation of dabbling in the Black Art, the hocus-pocus way in which the Lenny he had incarcerated was transformed into the Doctor he found, conjoined with the peculiarly strange, eldritch, and Mephistophelean physiognomy and person of Riccabocca, could not but strike a thrill ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... scorn in ballads and mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his hands when the priest elevated the host. The most sacred words of the old worship, the words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery as "Hocus-pocus." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... floral part of Nature's great horticultural show. She alone is competent to say whether there is any available remedy for the stained breadth in Jane's dress,—whether the fatal spot by any magical hocus-pocus can be cut out from the fulness, or turned up and smothered from view in the gathers, or concealed by some new fashion of trimming falling with generous appropriateness exactly across the fatal weak point. She can tell you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various



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