SOURCE: "Teutonick Chimericall Extravagancies: Alchemy, Poetry, and the Restoration Revolt Against Enthusiasm," in Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration, The University Press of Kentucky, 1996, pp. 260-93.

In the following essay, Linden suggests that Butler's main characters in Hudibras "exist within an occult milieu" and that Butler, like other Restoration contemporaries, attacks the occult arts in his poem.

… In Hudibras, Butler's major work, many of the objects of satirical commentary that are present in "An Hermetic Philosopher" appear once more, but the peculiarly "Hudibrastic" technique of this long poem results in a work of far greater humor, trenchancy, and originality. John Wilders has written that the poem's satirical mode is varied, combining such elements as invective, caricature, mock disputation, and farce within the encompassing vehicle of the mock heroic, which "depends for its effect on the violent contrast between subject and treatment."⁵¹ As I...