… 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 hope to demonstrate, these qualities, as well as the attributes of the Hudibrastic style—gross distortions in meter and rhyme, colloquial language, and bizarre imagery—when applied to the materials of mid-seventeenth-century occultism, create a satirical method that is keen and incisive. They are well suited to the task of deflating and debasing those aspects of religious nonconformism that are the Royalist Butler's principal targets. In Hudibras, as in the finest examples of alchemical satire previously considered, the varied forms of occultism serve as an effective vehicle for commenting on a wide range of flaws in human character and behavior.

While alchemy, per se, plays virtually no part in Butler's mock-heroic, his main characters and several of their major adventures definitely exist within an occult milieu. For this reason, it is necessary to broaden my focus in order to encompass the diversity of satirical objects and methods, just as has been the case with his prose character. Thus in terms of his comprehensive treatment of many aspects of contemporary occultism—astrology, magic, Rosicrucianism, Platonism, the cabala, witchcraft—Butler is following the lead of several of the attackers of occultism whose works I have considered. There is, however, one important difference. Whereas Glanvill, Parker, Ward, and others championed the aims and achievements of the Royal Society, we see no such respect paid in Hudibras. Scientific experimentalism and the virtuosi are for Butler as worthy of condemnation as the perpetrators and victims of occult charlatanism. In fact, he draws no real distinction between them: both groups are victims of zeal and enthusiasm, whether imparted by the New Light or the New Science.

Like other Restoration (and Royalist) attackers of the occult arts, Butler establishes their connection with philosophical and religious enthusiasm at the outset. Not only is Sir Hudibras a " Presbyterian true blew," but in his absorption in arcane scientific knowledge and impractical schemes he is a close relative of his contemporary, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, the protagonist of Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso. No less than Gimcrack's designs for learning to swim on dry land and selling bottles of air, Hudibras's "learning" in the trivium and the quadrivium is palpably nonsensical, in the manner of the satire of the Rosicrucian brotherhood in Butler's prose character and Swift's scientific projectors in the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels. For Butler, Shadwell, and Swift, impractical and futile "scientific" ventures, even when (or especially when) associated with the Royal Society, come to replace the specific occult arts as objects of satire. Hudibras's intellectual bent amounts to an idée fixe that dooms him to impracticality:

For he by Geometrick scale
Could take the size of Pots of Ale;
Resolve by Sines and Tangents straight,
If Bread or Butter wanted weight;
And wisely tell what hour o'th' day
The Clock does strike, by Algebra.
[part 1, canto 1, 121-26]

But if the Knight's absurdities take the form of comic self-deception, the flaws of his companion and squire, Ralph, strike much deeper, for in him we see eccentricities and deviations that are not only self-deceiving but also pose threats to social, religious, and political stability. Butler's principal means of demonstrating sectarian destructiveness is to present it as issuing forth in the form of dictates from the "New Light," which, in turn, is related to the absurdities seen in the contemporary occult milieu. Ralph is, therefore, a specific example of the character type represented in "An Hermetic Philosopher" and a concrete embodiment of the varied tendencies castigated in the treatises of Restoration opponents of occultism.⁵² At the heart of both versions is the strong link between occult philosophy and enthusiasm; as Samuel Parker observed, "there is so much Affinity between Rosi-Crucianisme and Enthusiasme, that whoever entertains the one, he may upon the same Reason embrace the other:"⁵³

[Ralph's] Knowledge was not far behind
The Knight's, but of another kind,
And he another way came by't:
Some call it Gifts, and some New light;

A Liberal Art, that cost no pains
Of Study, Industry, or Brains….
A light that falls down from on high,
For Spiritual Trades to cousen by:
[1.1.473-78, 501-2]

As a result of Butler's insistence on the close links between religious non-conformity, occultism, and enthusiasm, the descriptions of Ralph's background, "learning," and interests become a comprehensive catalog of both current and more traditional mystical and magical materials rendered comic through the deflationary effects of his style and technique. For example, in Butler's eclectic vision, not only are the individual arts lumped together ("For mystick Learning, wondrous able / In Magick, Talisman, and Cabal"), but—owing to the nature of enthusiasm as a "false conceit of inspiration"—they are held to zealously and dogmatically by adherents such as Ralph: "Thus Ralph became infallible, / As three or four-legg'd Oracle, / The ancient Cup, or modern Chair; / Spoke truth point-blank, though unaware:" (1.1.519-22). It follows that Ralph should be well grounded in platonic cosmology and, like the "Hermetic Philosopher," he is "Deep-sighted in Intelligences" and the "intelligible" world, as opposed to the terrestrial one. The sources of his knowledge—Agrippa, Anthroposophus (i.e., Thomas Vaugh an), Fludd, and Jacob Boehme—are, in Butler's deflationary couplet technique, "for profound / And solid Lying much renown'd" (1.1.533-36).

From the references to Vaughan and Fludd it is only a short step to the topic of Rosicrucianism, the real or imaginary brotherhood that Butler holds in special disrepute. Here, as in Samuel Parker's attack on the varying forms of Platonism, the Rosicrucians appear to function in Restoration England as a kind of objective correlative for the large and diverse occult milieu. Butler's identification of Ralph's knowledge with Rosicrucian lore is tantamount to designating it as absurd and useless; in his own note on "Verè adeptus" in the following quotation he states that the phrase means "one that has Commenc'd in their Fanatique extravagance."⁵⁴ Ralph is "In Rosy-Crucian Lore as learned, / As he that Verè adeptus earned. He understood the speech of Birds / As well as they themselves do words:" (1.1.539-42), and his knowledge is often expressed in the form of fortune-telling and astrology, a motif that Butler will develop much further in the Sidrophel episode. In the present passage, Ralph's feigning of astrological skill based on the inner light merely serves the purpose of cheating others:

He could foretell whats'ever was
By consequence to come to pass.
As Death of Great men, Alterations,
Diseases, Battels, Inundations.
All this without th'eclipse of Sun,
Or dreadful Comet, he hath done,
By inward light.
[1.1.567-73]

With these powers he carries out his petty practice of astrology, physiognomy, and the casting of horoscopes: "Thus [with the New Light] was th'accomplish'd Squire endu'd / With Gifts and Knowledge, per'lous shrewd" (1.1.617-18).

But besides Hudibras and Ralph, Butler paints other characters and situations with enough of a varnish of occultism to render them ridiculous and enable them to serve in the debasement of knight and squire. Chief among these is the Rosicrucian Sidrophel, whose fortune-telling skills Hudibras seeks in order to discover his prospects for success in the wooing of the Widow. Nicolas H. Nelson has argued that this extended episode is Butler's response to the vigorous controversy over astrology and the many resulting publications both for and against it that appeared in England in the 1640s and 1650s; and, further, that astrology's most aggressive defenders were radical sectarians, who were rapidly emerging with the blessing and support of the Puritan regime.⁵⁵ While it is possible that Butler's Sidrophel may be drawn from hints in the life of William Lilly, the author of England's propheticall Merline (1644) and Christian Astrology (1647), who is referred to in the poem, John Wilders is correct in stating that the satire of astrology and experimental science is generalized and not limited to a particular individual.⁵⁶ Rather, Sidrophel, no less than the portrait of the Hermetic Philosopher, should be read in the context of the broader late seventeenth-century occult milieu that they, in part, embody.

Like Parker, whose Free and Impartial Censure followed the separately printed editions of parts 1 and 2 of Hudibras by only two or three years, Butler grounds his characters and action in the Sidrophel episode (part 2, canto 3) in the link between Rosicrucianism, astrology, and other occult arts, a connection that Butler announces in the canto's argument:

The Knight with various doubts possest
To win the Lady, goes in Quest
Of Sidrophel the Rosy-crucian,
To know the Dest'nies resolution;
With whom being met, they both chop Logick,
About the Science Astrologick.
[p. 152]

Seeking information from Sidrophel concerning his possible success in wooing the widow, Hudibras, unlike the reader, is unaware of the trap that awaits him. Butler's imagery leading into this episode effectively suggests the myriad ways in which superstitiousness and chicanery can lead the ignorant to misadventure: there are images of birds being caught by strange noises, lights, and snares and of men being duped with promises of alchemical "Med'cine, and Receit," or as the prey of crooked lawyers. Other men, like Hudibras, consult wizards "to foresee / What shall, and what shall never be" (2.3.25-26). Again, Butler's mock-heroic style effectively ridicules Hudibras by juxtaposing things great and small: "O that I could enucleate, / And solve the Problems of my Fate; / Or find by Necromantick art, / How farr the Dest'nies take my part" (2.3.93-96), a technique continued in the listing of the "deep importances" (ll. 105-24) that prompt people to seek out Sidrophel. He who "deals in Destinies dark Counsels," we learn, is a cunning man and witch whose supernatural gifts enable the villagers to recover their lost silver or find cures for ailing livestock.

In contrast to these trivial exercises in the supernatural, Hudibras's quest is far more ambitious and daring, just as Butler's satire is morally more incisive. Hudibras seeks nothing less than advice from the devil, which, Ralph assures him, the Saints have every right to expect because there are many precedents for supernatural predictions and intervention on their behalf. In these passages, Ralph's argument is laced with personal names and places: Martin Luther, Matthew Hopkins, Edward Kelley, George Wither, Woodstock, and Sarum. References to political issues and military campaigns also heighten the overall satiric effect, deepening and rendering concretely (albeit humorously) the implications of witchcraft, astrology, magic, and devil worship as far as religious hypocrisy and social instability are concerned. For Hudibras, the decision to consult Sidrophel is obvious: "Quoth Hudibras, The case is cleer, / The Saints may 'mploy a Conjurer; / As thou hast prov'd it by their practice" (2.3.189-91). The thematic link with Jonson's avaricious Puritan brethren in The Alchemist is clear and direct: with the sanction of the inner light, human nature will go to any extreme to satisfy its desires.

To refer to Sidrophel merely as an astrologer or a magician is, however, to put the matter too simply and to distort the objective of Butler's satire. In addition to his occult interests, Sidrophel is a scientific projector, and Butler, as Swift was later to do, includes a full measure of satire on the experimental science of his day just as he attacked its occult interests. This extension of satire to "scientific" endeavors of the later seventeenth century marks a new and final direction in the tradition of alchemical satire that I have been tracing. What was Butler's position with respect to the emerging experimental science and the "institution-alization" of science as seen in the Royal Society? John Wilders has described it as follows:

Holding as he did an essentially empirical view of knowledge, Butler might be expected to have sympathized with the growing interest in science and with the deliberations of the Royal Society. In fact, he had little or no respect for the scientists, exposing them to ridicule both in Hudibras and in his best minor poem, The Elephant in the Moon. It is true that he shared something of their practical, empirical attitude, but he could see little of value in their activities. They were, he believed, as prone to error and misapprehension as other men, and, in their over-exclusive concern for experiment and discovery, were apt to be absorbed by the trivial rather than the useful, or to seek for wonders at the expense of truth.⁵⁷

To fit Sidrophel as the vehicle for this broader vein of satire, it was necessary that Butler provide him with a more comprehensive background than if he were a mere witch or quack astrologer. Although Butler ironically refers to him as a "Profound Gymnosophist" (2.3.196), the mystical and ascetic significations of this term are as inadequate as the word "Conjurer" (2.3.202) to describe the range of his interests and ambitions. Butler therefore endows him with qualifications that will position him within both the occult and scientific milieus, granting him expertise in mathematics, optics, philosophy, magic, horoscopy, and astrology. In addition he is an

For the success of Butler's satire on both the occult and scientific milieus, it is important that, along with Sidophel's breadth of background, a pervasive sense of futility attend his efforts. The images of a dog on a treadmill, trying to climb the wheel, like that of Sidrophel's attempted advancement in the "Circle of the Arts," are informed by the myth of Sisyphus and the idea of Fortune's wheel: "And still he's in the self same place, / Where at his setting out he was" (ll. 213-14). Futility and misspent effort are thus implicit in both types of endeavors.

Given Butler's skepticism about the utility of experimental science, it is essential that Sidrophel's endeavors be incontrovertibly impractical and useless in improving the human condition: this is the point Shad-well makes in The Virtuoso, as does Swift through the scientific projectors that Gulliver visits in the third voyage. For this reason, Butler presents in great detail the authors and works from which Sidrophel derives his knowledge, "authorities" that an elite audience might have regarded with derision. Roger Bacon and Robert Grosthead ("Hodg Bacon, and Bob Grosted") are included here (2.3.224), not for their philosophical and scientific achievements but for their reputations as learned magicians and conjurers. Although in the course of the seventeenth century, Bacon's reputation was steadily rehabilitated toward scientific respectability, nevertheless, in Butler's time, he would still have been best known as the magician-hero of Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and chapbook tradition.⁵⁸ Also among the important influences on Sidrophel are John Dee and Edward Kelley. Dee, however, is not cited for his extraordinary learning or skill in mathematics and medicine, but for the notoriety resulting from his dabblings in the spirit world in association with his "skryer" Kelley. An account of this unfortunate relationship had—to the destruction of Dee's reputation—been published by Meric Casaubon in 1659 while Hudibras was being written:⁵⁹ "H' [Si-drophel] had read Dee's Prefaces before / The Dev'l, and Euclide o're and o're. / And, all th'Intregues, 'twixt him and Kelly, / Lescus and th'Emperor, would tell yee" (2.3.235-38). As with his treatment of Roger Bacon, Butler's refashioning of Dee's reputation is achieved at the expense of Dee's scientifically valuable preface to the Billingsley translation of Euclid's Elements (1570), which Butler disparages through association with the petty intrigues with Kelley at the courts of the Polish prince Albert Laski and Emperor Rudolph II in Prague. And, continuing this pattern of diminution, commentary on Paracelsus is at this point limited to the prescription for making an artificial man (2.3.299-300).

Additional figures will be considered shortly; however, we may pause here to examine several tendencies in Butler's reductive approach to occult and scientific authorities and ideas. One obvious effect of the consistent debunking of such figures is to debase and trivialize the traditions and worldviews they represent. Butler is as skeptical of metaphysical abstruseness as he is of experimental science, and his principal objection to philosophical speculation is its remoteness from matters of genuine human concern and benefit. Early in the portrait of Sidrophel, for example, Butler calls attention to the astrologer's knowledge of the "Intelligible world," the abstract realm of ideas derived from platonic tradition, and then proceeds to describe sardonically the complex network of correspondences that obtain between macrocosm and microcosm:

Th'Intelligible world he knew,
And all, men dream on't, to be true:
That in this World, there's not a Wart,
That has not there [in the microcosm] a Counterpart;
Nor can there on the face of Ground,
An Individuall Beard be found,
That has not, in that Forrain Nation,
A fellow of the self-same fashion;
[2.3.225-32]

Sharing Samuel Parker's distrust of platonically derived metaphysical speculation, Butler criticizes the substitution of the abstract "Intelligible" world for the terrestrial one as the object of greatest human concern. This commonsense approach to human knowledge and need is revealed as well in Butler's enumeration of the absurd ways in which man attempts to utilize his knowledge. Sidrophel, like Hudibras, would relish the use of "Geometrick scale" to calculate the size of ale pots. We see his grotesque fascination with futile incongruities throughout the portrait, but especially in his "practical" applications of astrology to daily life. For example, Sidrophel finds through astrology propitious times for both planting and harvest, and, as village cunning man, he uses stellar influences to facilitate the art of healing: "When for anoynting Scabs or Itches, / Or to the Bum applying Leeches;" (2.3.245-46).

Butler combines these satiric motifs most effectively in Sidrophel's fascination with the moon, with which he "was more familiar / Than e're was Almanackwell-willer" (2.3.239-40). The moon is at once a symbol of Sidrophel's remoteness from humanity, of the futility of abstract speculation and philosophizing, and, most important, of madness itself. (Butler would not have been impressed with Penseroso's nocturnal studies of the occult in the "high lonely Tow'r," and Sidrophel is a kind of utterly debased, comic portrait of him.) Above all else, Sidrophel is a lunatic. His removal from the terrestrial world to a realm of abstract speculation makes the moon a perfect habitation for him: in fact, the moon's "Secrets [he] understood so clear, / That some believ'd he had been there" (2.3.241-42), and, obsessed by the moon's visionary aspects, he proceeds to act under her inspiration, becoming a kind of mad scientific projector, oblivious to the impracticality and futility of his inventions and calculations:

He made an Instrument to know
If the Moon shine at full, or no,
That would as soon as e're she shon, streit
Whether 'twere Day or Night demonstrate;
Tell what her D'ameter t'an inch is,
And prove she is not made of Green Cheese.
[2.3.261-66]

Although the "Instrument" Sidrophel has invented might tend to mark him as an empiricist, it is without value because he fails to utilize it for human betterment; moreover, it cannot assist in the discovery of truth because he lacks the ability to make accurate observations and to draw valid conclusions from them. Unable thus to discover truth through common sense and empirical investigation, Sidrophel's "knowledge" amounts to bizarre extrapolations from absurd, stubbornly held ideas. He is therefore a failure in his use of both induction and deduction; he is the chief victim of his own quackery.

While astrology underlies much of Sidrophel's absurdity, Butler is also at pains to present his follies as the confused efforts of an experimental scientist. To achieve this purpose, he will, at times, adopt the vocabulary of scientific reports: "demonstrat[ing]" (ll. 264, 267), "prov[ing]" (l. 266), "quot[ing]" and "detect[ing]" (ll. 283, 285), even "applying" "Med'cines, to th'Imagination" (ll. 287-88). Or, as Wilders notes, he will also satirize actual experiments by leading scientists of the time, as in the description of the use of the microscope to observe a flea's pulse, which is drawn from Robert Hooke's demonstrations before the Royal Society and was later published in his Micrographia:⁶⁰

Whether a Pulse beat in the black
List, of a Dappled Louse's back:
If Systole or Diastole move
Quickest, when hee's in wrath, or love: …

Whether his Snout a perfect Nose is,
And not an Elephants Proboscis,
[2.3.305-8, 315-16]

Similarly, Butler's extensive appropriation of the vocabulary of the occult sciences, especially astrology, is most evident in the description of Whacham, Sidrophel's Under-Conjurer, / Or Journey-man Astrologer," who extracts information from clients, which they, in turn, will pay to receive from the conjurer (2.3.332-42). Whacham is also his master's poetaster, putting into "Dogrel-Rimes his Spells, / Which over ev'ry Month's blank-page / In th' Almanack, strange Bilks presage" (2.3.374-76). It is entirely possible that Butler's sardonic view of the poetaster's source of inspiration owes something to the link between enthusiasm and the poetic faculty that some of his scientific contemporaries were asserting.

Butler's satire encompasses a variety of other topics and authorities associated with the occult tradition. Along with Paracelsus and his homunculus referred to earlier, Butler also notes the possibility of "fir[ing] a Mine in China, here / With Sympathetick Gunpowder" (2.3.295-96), apparently a weapon akin in principle to Sir Kenelm Digby's "miraculous powder of Sympathy," believed to effect cures at great distances from the wound itself. The latter is, in fact, alluded to in part 3, canto 2, lines 1030-31. And near the dwelling of Sidrophel and Whacham there is an obelisk with an inscription, written "not in words, / But Hieroglyphick Mute of Birds" (2.3.405-6). More important, there is the notion, associated with the astrological omen of the fallen planet, that the end of the world was imminent. For Butler, the absurdity of this idea, here emphasized by the absurdity of its evidence, i.e., the image of a boy's kite as seen through the lens of Sidrophel's telescope, effectively combines religious millenarianism, science, and pseudoscience, reminding us of the historical connection between millenarianism and occultism in the minds of the radical sectarians. Scathing references also abound in the latter part of canto 3 to a range of occult and hermetic authorities who, as earlier noted, were subject to attack in the writings of proponents of the New Science and the Royal Society. Among these are "Bumbastus, [i.e., Paracelsus, who] kept a Devil's Bird / Shut in the Pummel of his Sword" (2.3.627-28), Edward Kelley who "did all his Feats upon / The Devil's Looking-glass, a Stone," Agrippa, and Boehme. This indictment extends to the earliest of the hermetic authorities and the prisci theologi, Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, and "Appollonius their Master" (2.3.656), as well as to such mid-seventeenth-century astrologers as John Booker, William Lilly, and Sarah Jimmers, identified as an author of astrological predictions and almanacs.⁶¹ Later in the poem, there is incidental satire of Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit authority on Egyptian hieroglyphics (3.2.1583-86), and hieroglyphics are themselves invoked to satirize the Rump parliament (3.2.1587-96). Clearly, the tendency to attack the varied forms of occultism collectively, which we have seen in the writings of Restoration intellectuals, is continued in Hudibras.

Butler's harshest satire is reserved for the Rosicrucians, who epitomize the most negative aspects of occultism. Hudibras, in conversation with Sidrophel concerning various means of conjuring the devil, begins this attack. He speaks of the superiority of the method used by the Rosicrucians, with its philosophical and cosmological ploys for capturing heavenly influences:

The Rosy-crucian way's more sure,
To bring the Devil to the Lure,

Each of em has a sev'ral Gin,
To catch Intelligences in.
Some by the Nose with fumes trapan 'em, …

Others with Characters and Words,
Catch 'em as men in Nets do Birds.
And some with Symbols, Signs, and Tricks,
Engrav'd in Planetary nicks.
With their own influences, will fetch 'em,
Down from their Orbs, arrest and catch 'em.
[2.3.613-17; 619-24]

In these lines Hudibras attributes to the Rosicrucians several means of calling down the spirit world, and immediately following he associates with the brotherhood a representative group of magicians who, by this time, had come to be identified with occultism in a general sense. These include Paracelsus, who was not a Rosicrucian,⁶² Kelley, and Agrippa, each of whom, according to Hudibras, has his own means of demonic conjuration. Hudibras's inclusion of these three figures prompts an immediate response from Sidrophel, and thus begins their debate on the merits of astrology. Sidrophel at first defends Agrippa and Paracelsus against charges of demonic conjuration and proceeds to lighten Hudibras's charges against the Rosicrucians:

To this, quoth Sidrophello, Sir,
Agrippa was no Conjurer,
Nor Paracelsus, no nor Behman;
Nor was the Dog [of Agrippa] a Cacodœmon,
But a true Dog, that would shew tricks,
For th' Emperor, and leap o're sticks; …

As for the Rosi-cross Philosophers,
Whom you will have to be but Sorcerers;
What they pretend to, is no more,
Then Trismegistus did before,
Pythagoras, old Zoroaster,
And Appollonius their Master;
[2.3.641-46; 651-56]

Following this response to Hudibras, Sidrophel broadly defends the validity of astrology and omens of all sorts as means of predicting the future. Hudibras, who curiously appears to be Butler's spokesman, then counters with the argument that knowledge acquired through astrology or other forms of occultism is unlikely to contribute to the improvement of the human condition; or, to put the issue in the form of a question, can the follies imported to mankind from the moon exceed those that are already here in plentiful supply? His conclusion to this portion of the debate is thoroughly conventional:

So when your Speculations tend
Above their just and useful end,
Although they promise strange and great
Discoveries of things far fet,
They are but idle Dreams and Fancies
And savour strongly of the Ganzas.
[2.3.777-82]

Butler would surely have agreed; he had no patience with dwellers in the "high lonely Tow'r."

Although the Sidrophel episode is Butler's most extended treatment of Rosicrucianism and hermeticism, he returns to these topics occasionally in later cantos. In the first canto of part 3 he refers to magical rites in which "Bewitch[ed] Hermetique-men … Run / Stark staring mad with Manicon," a kind of deadly night-shade. He then turns immediately to strange feats of the "Mechanick Virtuosi / [who] Can raise 'em Mountains in Potosi" (3.1.323-26). The presence of these two passages in a list of similar supernatural performances suggests again that Butler makes no important distinction between the virtuosi and ranker forms of occult charlatanism. Finally, in discussing the effects of irrational fears on the human mind, Butler draws together the idea of the diseased imagination and Rosicrucianism. Baseless fear, he states, has

There is little doubt that the attacks on the varied forms of occultism and hermeticism present in "An Hermetic Philosopher" and Hudibras are accurate reflections of Butler's true views on these subjects. His range of reference—to ideas, authors, titles, quotations, topics, and relationships—is broad, surely indicating acquaintance with many of these materials and that his rejection of occultism was far more informed than that of a number of the earlier satirists I have considered. These assessments of Butler's views on the occult milieu are also corroborated by evidence from his Prose Observations. In one such reference Butler rejects the boasts of cabalists, especially Lull and Agrippa, of being able to impart vast quantities of knowledge to the ignorant quickly through the art of memory, so that "Illitterate and Decrepit old men, with Boys of Ten yeares of Age, have, in a short Space, been inabled, by this Sole Art to dispute with the wisest Doctors of his Times in all manner of Learning."⁶⁴ Similarly, he disparages those who claim to have derived occult learning by means of the art of memory, asserting that this is a state of profound delusion resulting from the operation of inspiration and imagination. Such are the fanciful stones of "Cardan, and Nicholas Flamell, who by buying two guilt Books of two Strangers whom they met by Accident, became immediatly learned; the first in the Latine Tongue, of which he was utterly Ignorant before; and the other, by the help of a Jew, and St James in the Philosophers Stone…. But these are but the Conceptions of wearyd Melancholy, like the Images which a Sick or Idle Fancy will observe in the fire, or such as Cardan saw upon a wall" (135).

Of Pythagoras and the tradition of the prisci theologi that he represents, Butler states that "No Sect of Philosophers ever lasted so long, or propagated so far as that of Pythagoras, although perhaps one of the most extravagant and Sensles of all others" (176). And, finally, the same scorn and skepticism, consistently present in Butler's statements on all forms of occult thought, appear again in both his short poem entitled "Chymistry," where the art becomes synonymous with deception and greed, and in his remark in the Prose Observations that "The Reasons and Arguments of Chymists are like their operations upon Mettles, They give a Tincture of Truth upon Error, and Falshood as they do, of Gold and Silver upon Copper, but it will not indure the Test."⁶⁵

Thus Butler shares with many of his contemporaries in the universities and the Royal Society the idea that rampant zeal and enthusiasm were responsible for much of the political, religious, and social instability that had distressed England in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. They also agreed that the occult milieu—a notable manifestation of this enthusiasm—was broad and varied in extent and form and eminently in need of banishment if truth, reason, common sense, and stability were to be restored in society. However, at this point Butler and his scientific contemporaries part company. That he chose laughter and the sardonic wit of the mock-heroic and Hudibrastic style as his weapons in this attack marks one difference; no less important is the fact that he chose to direct these weapons against the absurdities of the New Science itself.

Notes

…⁵¹ Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), xxxiii. For Wilders and most critics, the marks of Butler's style are obvious: "earthy, colloquial language, intentionally clumsy rhythms, and comic rhymes, which debase everything they describe" (xl). All references to the poem are to this edition.

⁵² This is not to say that he is modeled on a comic version of any particular occult philosopher, as has sometimes been argued. On the question of possible originals for Ralph, see the Wilders edition of Hudibras, 330, n. 451, and George R. Wasserman, Samuel "Hudibras" Butler (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 54, 57.

⁵³ Parker, Free and Impartial Censure, 72-3.

⁵⁴ Butler, Hudibras, 17n.

⁵⁵ "Astrology, Hudibras, and the Puritans," JHI 37 (1976): 521-36.

⁵⁶ Butler, Hudibras, 390n, 454.

⁵⁷ Butler, Hudibras, xxv-xxvi. The earlier, octosyllabic version of "The Elephant in the Moon" is generally thought to have been written in 1675-76, the pentameter version slightly later; they were not published until Robert Thyer's edition of the Genuine Remains in 1759. For Butler's thoughts on science, especially as related to "The Elephant in the Moon," see also Wasserman, Samuel "Hudibras" Butler, 39-42.

⁵⁸ On Roger Bacon's changing Renaissance reputation, see the introduction to my edition of The Mirror of Alchimy, xxxiii-xlvi.

⁵⁹ See A True and Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee … and Some Spirits (London, 1659).

⁶⁰ See Butler, Hudibras, 394n. and Wilders's other notes on this passage.

⁶¹ Butler, Hudibras, 403n. On these and other figures involved in the mid-seventeenth century debate on astrology, see Nelson, "Astrology, Hudibras, and the Puritans."

⁶² In the Fama Fraternitatis, the first of the Rosicrucian manifestos (printed in Cassel, 1614), Paracelsus is treated as one of congenial temperament, although he is not a member of the fraternity. See the English translation included in Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 241, 247.

⁶³ The last two lines of this quotation recall a passage from the Confessio Fraternitatis, in which the author remarks on man's difficulty in reading the book of nature: "For as there is given to man two instruments to hear, likewise two to see, and two to smell, but only one to speak, and it were but vain to expect speech from the ears, or hearing from the eyes" (from the text included in Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 257).

⁶⁴Samuel Butler: Prose Observations, ed. Hugh De Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 135. All references are to this edition.

⁶⁵ The text of "Chymistry" appears in Samuel Butler: Satires and Miscellaneous Poetry and Prose, ed. René Lamar (Cambridge: University Press, 1928), 198. See the related poems on "Magique" (199), "Geomancy" (201), and "Astrology" (202). The prose passage is from Prose Observations, 134.