Modern concepts of mental illness have usually been depicted as first forming in reaction to witch hunts and demonic possession, so that scientific beliefs triumphed over superstition. Such a view dismisses as irrational belief in the Devil's activity in the world and it overlooks the extent to which medical naturalism was produced out of political struggle in France and England, which combined with a social process of distancing elite from popular culture throughout Western Europe. It was not the triumph of self-evident ideas that led first Anglicans and then dissenters to abandon their belief in supernatural causation and therapy when they had only the first inkling of an alternative explanation.

Historians have turned to anthropology in the search for conceptual tools to help explain belief in the supernatural and its decline. Unfortunately, the static models of society produced by the older schools of anthropological thought, viewing beliefs in terms of their function in maintaining the status quo, were unable to explain change unless imposed from without by a process of modernization or acculturation. More recent work has attempted to apply techniques of linguistics and semiotics and to set magical healing rituals in the context of a culture's other beliefs and practices. When these developments have been fully absorbed, they may provide a more sophisticated understanding of demonology. Nevertheless, given the relative lack of interest shown by English villagers in absolute, transcendent evil, the beliefs of ordinary English men and women may remain inaccessible.