This is all very old stuff, Jayto--anthropologists find the beliefs among "remote savages" and talk about the way that they are among the oldest and most primitive religious ideas, meanwhile it doesn't occur to people that a lot of people walking around in our supposedly modern and enlightened world still believe the same things.

I call this stuff "Identified weirdness", because we see the beliefs in, say, rural Appalachians who talk, dress, and behave in ways that are identifiably different, and associate the beliefs with the "differences"--

In reality, a lot of the people with "differences" don't hold the beliefs, and a lot of people who behave, speak, and dress in the "same" way as the mainstream actually hold the beliefs, but don't express them in an "identifiably weird" way.

There is a fair amount of evidence that, even in the middle ages, when these sort of beliefs seemed to flourish, there were a lot of people who knew that they were not true, and, in fact considered them foolish.