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Hocus Pocus
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Bokors are featured in many Haitian tales
and are often associated with the creation of ‘zombies’
by the use of a deadening brew or potion.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokor
This potion makes the drinker appear to be dead and thus he is often buried;
later, the Bokor will return for the “corpse”
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokor
at the appointed time he opened the grave again
and found a head on the leg bones of the skeleton
(skull and crossbones). The same voice bade him
‘guard it Well, for it would be the giver of all good things’,
and so he carried it away with him. It became his protecting genius,
and he was able to defeat his enemies by merely showing them the magic head.
In due course, it passed to the possession of the order.
- Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln
The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail
a relic such as the head of Jesus Christ
would have been regarded as the most extreme blasphemy
after all, the Christians believe that
at Crucifixion Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.
Such a relic would have completely undermined the Biblical Salvation History
and called into question the Vatican’s right to exist.
- Tobias Wabbel
The Templar Treasure: An Investigtion
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Heronimus placed the metal head reverently in the center of the silver platter. His practiced hands located the hidden locking mechanism and triggered it; the lock clicked and released. The hiss of escaping pressurized gas slowly faded as it was absorbed and assimilated into the humid night air. The severed head, known to The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor Heronimus Jones as Jung the Elder, gasped for breath as soon as he was free of the mask.
Annoyed, lips pursed into a scowl, Jung glared at Heronimus as The Reverend Doctor dabbed the moisture from Jung's forehead with an embroidered kerchief. Jung grumbled testily. Damn my eyes, man! I thought my face was going to melt off in that thing. And you acting as if you had all the time in the world to release me. If The Elder could've shaken his head in disgust, he would have. The Reverend Doctor smiled gently as he replied.
"Ahhh, mi amigo, I doth hope thou canst findeth forgiveness in thy heart. I doth be findin' it surprisin' such discomforts o’ ye flesh doth vex thee still"
Heronimus folded the kerchief and set it down next to the platter on the oaken table. He poured black coffee from a silver decanter into rather large porcelain mug, then removed a small phial concealed in his weskit, and measured a drop from it into his drink. A minute whiff of vapor appeared, spiraled, then was gone. The Reverend Doctor swirled the mixture before sniffing it and sipping the liquid experimentally. Satisfied, he closed his right eye, stared intently at Jung the Elder with his left, and raised his mug in salute.
“D’Agon fhtagn.”
The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor drank deeply from the cup, both eyes closed as if in prayer or meditation. He reopened his eyes, and sat still and silent for a few contemplative moments before speaking.
"Now, pray tell, old friend, what hath thou divined concernin’ ye task at hand?”
The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor's wry smile vanished behind the lip of the blue and white cup as he sipped the black liquid, but nothing could hide the twinkle in his eye. The Head of Brew D’Agon's Think-Tank frowned at the Reverend Doctor’s bad taste. As much as Jung loved to feel the caress of his own voice on his own ears, he saw what game was afoot and knew better than to feed Jones’ ego with a reply. The Head bit his tongue, smirking begrudgingly. He deserved the subtle teasing about his current disembodied state.
Once feared throughout the Seven Seas, “Cannibal Carlito” now appeared to be little more than a severed head resting on a silver platter. Even in this condition, Jung the Elder radiated a power so strong even a non-sensitive could sense something “magnetick” permeating the air around him. But do not be mistaken, the head of Carlito Jung was not a trophy of war, no mere souvenir shrunken head. Jung was one of the living dead. He was an Elder, an Egun, a spirit at the Crossroads, chained to the material realm by an oath-binding during a ritual that might be mistaken for voodoo, but which was ancient even in the days of Babylon. The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor Heronimus Jones, himself, had wielded the blade and performed the service necessary to complete the gruesome magick. The Reverend Doctor had no moral qualms about the bloody surgery. He knew Jung deserved both his judgment and his chance at redemption. Almost everyone else who knew Cannibal Carlito when he lived would agree that beheading was too lenient a sentence for a pirate guilty of so many crimes against humanity. If anyone dared argue that Carlito did not deserve such a fate, they would most likely be arguing that a second chance to save his soul was far too generous. But, believe it or not, there was a reason Heronimus offered Jung a second chance at Salvation; there was a method to the madness, a method rooted in an ancient science.
“Cannibal” Carlito had earned his grisly appellation due to his appropriation of a macabre aspect of native Caribbean culture. Carlito had first tasted human flesh 20 years earlier, after his ship sank in a hurricane. Adrift for nearly a month with less than a handful of his crew and no provisions, Carlito faced two gruesome choices: eat or be eaten. Unlike other civilized men who found themselves in similar dire circumstances, Carlito enjoyed the flavor of his travelling companions, and feasted on them greedily. What began as an act of self-defense and survival became an insatiable lust that would become his trademark… if you would not give Cannibal Carlito what he wanted, he would simply take it, and you would become meat for his table as punishment for your defiance. The tactic worked; word spread and his victims gave Cannibal Carlito what he wanted as soon as he demanded it — sometimes even before.
Years later, facing his impending doom, Carlito leapt at the opportunity to change his fate. He regretted the decision often during his un-death, but the bloody oath had been his only hope to escape the dark No-Thing that awaited him.
The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor's companion raven flapped its wings as it shifted position on its perch in the dimly lit far corner. Laughing to himself over Jung's elongated awkward silence, the Reverend Doctor turned his focus to the parchment, feathered quill, and ink on the table, making minute adjustments in their relative positions before finally, after what felt to Jung like maddeningly endless seconds, dipping the quill into the inkwell. He paused again, hand poised above the parchment, waiting for God-knows-what, and smiled cherubically at Jung the Elder.
"Yo ho & Tally ho!”
Beware the red herring.
“D'Agon fhtagn."
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In fiction and non-fiction
a red herring may be intentionally used by the writer
to plant a false clue that leads readers
or characters towards a false conclusion.
For example, the character of Bishop Aringarosa
in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
is presented for most of the novel as if
he is at the centre of the church’s conspiracies,
but is later revealed to have been innocently duped
by the true antagonist of the story.
The character’s name is a loose Italian translation of “red herring”.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
make the word
that is,
fish, in
which word
Christ is mystically understood,
because he was able to live without sin
in the abyss of this mortality
as in the depth of waters."
- Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis
The City of God
“The purpose is to baffle and lead into error
everyone except those whom God loves and provides for”.
His works seem to have been deliberately written
in highly esoteric code (see steganography),
so that only those who had been initiated
into his alchemical school could understand them.
It is therefore difficult at best for the modern reader
to discern which aspects of Jabir’s work
are to be read as symbols (and what those symbols mean),
and what is to be taken literally.
Because his works rarely made overt sense,
the term gibberish is believed to have originally referred to his writings
(Hauck, p. 19).
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabir_ibn_Hayyan
It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster,
of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive.
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,
I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.
A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque
and scaly body with rudimentary wings;
but it was the general outline of the whole
which made it most shockingly frightful.
- H.P. Lovecraft
The Call of Cthulhu
Their information is often seemingly incongruous and chaotic.
But their data are all convergent, and only start to make sense when properly culled
and carefully collated one with the other, as an ensemble.
Rather than sheer myth,
the places and personages just named are often no more
than mere codenames and metaphors
- Prof. Arysio N. dos Santos
Atlantis, the Lost Continent Finally Found
we must always keep in mind that the subject matter of Atlantis'
historical reality was the core of the secret of the ancient Mysteries.
Hence, it could not be openly divulged to the profanes except under a veil
of impenetrable mythical or religious allegories and other similar disguises
such as the ones we are presently discussing.
- Prof. Arysio N. dos Santos
Atlantis, the Lost Continent Finally Found
WM: And this is one of the techniques, incidentally,
that science fiction, I think, does.
It takes a possibility or something that does actually exist today
and extrapolates from that,
perhaps refines it, makes it more specific.
FH: The science of control by voice.
WM: Yes. Exactly.
BH: Wasn’t there a word in Semantics
where the message that we get across…
what was?..
FH: Metamessage.
BH: Metamessage.
WM: Metamessage.
- Frank Herbert
Interviewed with B. Herbert by Willis McNelly 3 Feb 1969
hocus (hō′kəs) tr.v. -cused, -cus*ing, -cus*es or -cusses, -cus*sing, -cus*ses.
1. To fool or decieve; hoax. 2. To infuse (food or drink) with a drug.
[Short for HOCUS-POCUS.]
ho*cus-po*cus (hō′kəs-pōkəs) n.
1. Nonsense words or phrases used as a formula by conjurers.
2. A trick performed by a magician or juggler. 3. A deception or chicanery.
– v. -cused, -cus*ing, -cus*es or -cusses, -cus*sing, -cus*ses.
-tr. To deceive; trick. -intr. To be deceptive.
[Poss. < an alteration of Lat. hoc est corpus, this is the body
(from its use in the Eucharist at the time of transubstantiation).]
- The American Heritage Dictionary
Second College Edition
The name Hocus Pocus as used by magicians
originated with an otherwise obscure 17th Century conjurer
who according to a 1655 text lived in the age of King James
& billed himself as “His Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus.”
He was first to use these very words as part of a faux-latin incantation which ran,
“Hocus pocus, toutous talontus, vade celerita jubes.”
The name was appropriated by a whole series of Tudor England conjurers & jugglers,
so that the history of the very first Hocus Pocus became lost
among a multitude of imitators, whose lowly social status
was not worthy of historical preservation.
Some have suggested the phrase predated His Majesties Hocus Pocus,
being corrupted from the name of a demonic sorcerer of Norse folklore,
Ochus Bochus. Ochus Bochus
is himself quite possibly a corruption of Bacchus, god of conjuration
who turned water into wine, wine into his own blood, & bread into his flesh
(all coopted from Dioynisianism).
Jesus said, in the Latin version of a cannibalistic passageof Christian gospel,
“Hoc est corpus meum,” or “This is my flesh,”
which some have speculated was condensed & mangled
into the very name of His Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus.
One further speculation is that Hocus Pocus is derived from the Welsh term
Hovea Pwca, a hoax perpetrated by a hob-goblin or will o’ the wisp
called a pwca, Pooka, or having the personal name Puck.
This creature was a shape-shifter whose name recurs throughout Europe
as a name of the devil, inclusive of Ochus Bachus.
- www.paghat.com/cranesbillhocus.html
“Shifts happen.”
- Mission Control
E.T. 101
There was a lot here which Smaug did not understand at all
(though I expect you do,
since you know all about Bilbo’s adventures
to which he was referring),
but he thought he understood enough,
and he chuckled in his wicked inside.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through
- Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There
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The first rays of morning light were just trying to peep with prying eyes through shuttered portholes as the Honourable Reverend Doctor Heronimus Jones set the black quill back in its stand. He stood — stretching, yawning — and sighed, well satisfied, before speaking.
“Thy work be done fer this night, mon ami. Verily, thou doth continually earneth mi eternal gratitude. D'Agon fhtagn.”
The Elder locked eyes with The Reverend Doctor as he spoke in his mind.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a chance that my damning oath was worth it. And so, my friend, it is I who should thank you.
The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor Heronimus Jones stood and bowed with a playfully melodramatic flourish. He picked up the silver platter on which Jung the Elder rested at peace. Heronimus carried the tray to the open wardrobe, and set the tray on a shelf. He pulled a small, steel key from one of the many concealed pockets in his weskit. With it, he unlocked the top left drawer. The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor continued turning the key an extra revolution, and then again – thrice around – and back twice, again. The key was pulled deeper into the keyhole. The Reverend Doctor repeated the procedure in reverse. The entire left side of the wardrobe slid sideways smoothly on a fantastically complex series of roller mechanisms as a hidden drawer opened. Inside the drawer, enshrined in black velvet, was a thick glass cylinder: approximately three feet in height and a foot and a half in diameter, filled to two-thirds capacity with an amber-hued fluid, and capped with a hermetically sealed metal lid judging by the hissing sound it produced as it was removed. Placing the lid next to the tray on the shelf, Heronimus cradled Jung the Elder gently in his hands. He held The Head over the mouth of "The Think Tank" and flashed a mischievous grin.
“'Twouldst be seamin' ye now be more cannonball than cannibal.”
They laughed together as The Head went SPLASH. The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor couldn't read Carlito’s lips, distorted as they were by the thick glass and translucent liquid. Inside his head, however, Heronimus heard the words ringing as clear as a bell.
Eat me.
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the cannibals roast their captain
in the style of the buccaneers,
and eat him bit by bit.
- Ernesto Frers
The Templar Pirates
"Well, I'll eat it," said Alice, "and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key;
and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door;
so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!"
- Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
He fed the machine.
- Robert A. Henlein
Stranger in a Strange Land
Licking her chops
She looks at
- Kongos
I’m Only Joking
all the lunatics committed there.
Robot Lords of Tokyo,
SMILE TASTE KITTENS!
Did you not know that
the royal hunting grounds are always forbidden?
- Clutch
10001110101
The most merciful thing in the world,
I think, is the inability of the human mind
to correlate all its contents.
We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction,
have hitherto harmed us little; but some day
the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality,
and of our frightful position therein,
that we shall either go mad from the revelation
or flee from the light
into the peace and safety
of a new dark age.
- H.P. Lovecraft
The Call of Cthulhu
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