To prove that impossible-looking things have ordinary causes, Scot had to show how they are done, and so a book written to stop witch trials contains detailed working descriptions of conjuring tricks: forcing, substitution, concealment, and the illusion of a head cut off and restored. Stage magicians found it, and they have kept reprinting it for four hundred years. It is one of the earliest printed accounts of sleight of hand in English, and it survives for reasons that would have baffled its author.
There is a second, less comfortable afterlife. In describing the conjurations and charms he meant to discredit, Scot preserved them, and later occultists mined the book as a source for the material it was attacking. Seventeenth century reprintings made this worse by adding a discourse on devils and spirits that Scot did not write, so an edition on a shelf today may contain arguments the author would have rejected outright.
One story about the book should not be repeated as fact. It is often said that James VI and I ordered every copy burned when he came to the English throne in 1603. There is no contemporary evidence for it and modern scholarship treats it as a later tradition. What is documented is that James named Scot in the preface to Daemonologie in 1597 and wrote against him.
Scot died in 1599. Most of what he concluded about the trials is what historians conclude now, which is a remarkable thing to say of a hop farmer writing in 1584.