The story goes that a priest held high a piece of bread and exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus!’ – ‘This is the body!’ – and the bread supposedly became the flesh of Christ.
In the minds of the illiterate peasants, who did not speak Latin, ‘Hoc est corpus!’ got garbled into ‘Hocus-pocus!’ and thus was born the powerful spell that can transform a frog into a prince, and a pumpkin into a carriage.
“The power of hocus-pocus is alive and well in our modern industrial world. For many people in 2018, two wooden sticks nailed together are God, a colourful poster on the wall is the Revolution, and a piece of cloth flapping in the wind is the Nation.” (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)