Lore 317: Smoke and Mirrors

Aaron Mahnke (0:12)

Halloween is right around the corner, and for most people, that means a rewatch of all the cozy seasonal favorites. Practical magic, over the garden wall, beetle juice, and of course, maybe the most quintessential Halloween nostalgia flick of all, Hocus Pocus.

Of course, the term Hocus Pocus far predates the Sanderson Sisters and their 1993 release. Like Abracadabra and Open Sesame, Hocus Pocus falls under the category of magic words that all of us just somehow seem to know. But have you ever wondered where those magic words come from? Well, as it turns out, stage magicians have been saying Hocus Pocus for more than 400 years. And before it was a common spell, it may just have been a person.

Apparently, one of the most popular magicians of the early 1600s was an Englishman named William Vincent. He'd do card tricks, swallow swords, make objects disappear, that sort of thing. As part of his act, though, he would utter nonsense, fake Latin phrases over the tricks to make them seem more mystical and spooky. Fake Latin like hocus pocus. Before long, he wasn't going by William Vincent anymore, but by his stage name, the king's most excellent hocus pocus.

He was famous enough that hocus pocus became a household name, and thus the magic word spread far and wide. In 1635, the first known magic trick manual in the English language was published under the title Hocus Pocus Jr. The Anatomy of Ledger Domain. Ledger Domain, by the way, was the 17th century word for sleight of hand. Did the magician Hocus Pocus write this book? Did he come up with the phrase himself, or did he borrow it from a competitor? Unfortunately, those details are lost to time. But one thing is for sure, sometimes magic and history intersect in ways that you would never expect.

I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

It's a trope that's found in countless fantasy stories, that of the king's magical advisor. The most famous, of course, is King Arthur's Merlin, but the list hardly stops there. There's Jafar from Aladdin, the Red Witch Melisandre from Game of Thrones, and of course, Hotepe and Hoi from DreamWorks' 1998 film The Prince of Egypt, who, fun fact, were based on Siegfried and Roy. Heck, even Gandalf picked up some government side work here and there. But here's the thing. Court magicians, they aren't limited to fiction. In fact, throughout history, magical chancellors were all too real, and so was their political power.

Back in ancient Mesopotamia, Assyrian kings would employ whole posses of magicians, each with their own supernatural specialty. One, for example, might be a pro at currying favor from the gods, another an expert in extispicy, which is reading the future from a sheep's liver. According to the Book of Daniel, the King Nebuchadnezzar had four flavors of sorcerer on staff. Exorcists, astrologer priests, dream interpreters, and scribes trained to interpret cuneiform books of omens. Meanwhile, over in Egypt, the pharaohs were bankrolling magicians of their own. Now, while most Egyptians of the time were illiterate, these elite individuals were able to read ancient spell books, giving them access to secret god-given knowledge. Using these texts, they would perform magical rituals to protect the pharaoh and defeat his enemies.

Then again, the pharaohs weren't exactly helpless on their own. It turns out they were often considered powerful magicians in their own right. As divine figures, every inch of a pharaoh's body was said to contain a special power called Heka, the same godly magic used to create the world. And this stuff was potent. So potent, in fact, that whenever the pharaoh received, say, a haircut or had his nails clipped, the excess had to be carefully disposed of, lest the Heka-filled ingredients fall into the wrong hands. And speaking of magic in the wrong hands, in ancient Rome, magic was nothing less than a tool for political propaganda. You see, astrology was super big in ancient Rome, and astrologers' words were believed to be absolute truth. So, for example, if an astrologer were paid to claim that an emperor's right to rule was written in the stars, well, then who were we the people to argue? This was such an effective bit of propaganda that some emperors even outlawed anyone but their own magicians from practicing astrology. After all, a bad prediction could straight up lose them the throne. Now, political sorcerers didn't die out with the ancients, though. The most recent Roman magician was actually operating in the 13th century, serving as the court astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.

And this guy's name was, and I swear to God, Michael Scott. Seriously, in the words of a very different Michael Scott, the politicians of the Middle Ages may not have been superstitious, but they were a little stitious.