1646. Randolph, Jealous Lovers, If I do not think women were got with riddling, whip me! Hocas Pocas, here you shall have me, and there you shall have me.
1654. Gayton, Test. Notes Don. Quix., 46. This old fellow had not the Hocas Pocas of Astrology.
1675. Wycherley, Country Wife, iii., 2. That burlesque is a hocus-pocus trick they have got.
d. 1680. Butler, Remains (1759), ii., 122. With a little heaving and straining, would turn it into Latin, as Mille hoco-pokiana, and a thousand such.
1689. Marvell, Historical Poem, line 90. With hocus-pocus.… They gain on tender consciences at night.
c. 1755. Adey, Candle in the Dark, p. 29. At the playing of every trick he used to say, hocus-pocus, tontus, talontus, vade celeriter jubeo.
1785. Grose, Vulg. Tongue, s.v. [[325]]
1824–28. Landor, Imaginary Conversations [2nd Ed., ii., 275]. Torke. What think you, for instance, of Hocus! Pocus! Johnson. Sir, those are exclamations of conjurors, as they call themselves.
1883. Daily Telegraph, 26 Mar., p. 5, c. 3. The lock of hair, the dragon’s blood, and the stolen flour were only the hocus-pocus of her sham witchcraft like the transfixed waxen puppets of the sorcerers of the past.
2. (old).—A trickster; a juggler; an impostor.