MAGIC WORDS 'pronounce the magic word 'Hiram Abif ' and the rooster and the duck will change places.'"19 (see popping sound) Variations and Incantations: • Hist "As they landed, Rolf waited a clear view, then gave a short sharp 'Hist!' It was like a word of magic, for it turned the three moving deer to three stony-still statues." -- Ernest Thompson Seton, Rolf In The Woods (1911) In Literature: • "The 'hissings and murmurings' . . . of magicians." -- Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law (1978) • "Jack Starhouse could make [cats] dance wild dances, leaping about upon their hind legs and casting themselves from side to side. This he did by strange sighs and whistlings and hissings." -- Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) • "He raised his hands slowly and extended them, cupping them around the precariously balanced globe without touching it. He bent his head and began to whisper. The words hissed and sizzled in the confined space of the wagon, rough and saw-edged." -- Patricia Wrede, Mairelon the Magician (1991) Hocus (see hocus pocus) This is Julius the Magnificent. I seem to be suffering from partial amnesia and can't remember what comes after hocus. -- Ron Goulart, Elementary, My Dear Groucho (1999) Meanings: • Bewitch "Could she hocus them again, by playing her charms and beguiling them with sweet words and fair promises?" -- George MacDonald Fraser, Flash- man and the Mountain of Light (1990) "[T]he lurid Mangaian legend in which infernal deities hocus and de stroy the souls of all . . ." -- Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896) 19 "Masons and Magicians," Mill-valley.freemasonry.biz