Witchcraft theory is the most influential and powerful viewpoint in the western theory on the origin of art, which is put forward on the basis of directly studying the relationship between primitive works of art and primitive religious witchcraft activities. It was first proposed by Taylor, a famous British anthropologist, in his book Primitive Culture.

This view explains the origin of art with practicality, and holds that primitive art has great practical and utilitarian value in the minds of primitive people. According to this theory, although there are many beautiful animal images in prehistoric cave murals depicted by primitive people today, they are inspired by a motive unrelated to aesthetics, namely witchcraft.

For example, many cave murals and sculptures in the late Paleolithic period are often located in the darkest and inaccessible places in caves. Obviously, they were not made for appreciation, but prehistoric humans tried to ensure the success of hunting through witchcraft.

There are also some animals painted or engraved with marks of being stabbed and hit by spears or sticks. According to witchcraft, this is because there is a sympathetic witchcraft in primitive tribes. Primitive people think that the image of anything has a real connection with actual things. If the image of things is affected,

In fact, it is to exert influence on this thing, and to draw scars on animals means that they can successfully hit their prey in actual hunting.

These animal images with stab wounds or wound marks in the original murals have become strong evidence to support the theory that art originated from witchcraft. Witchcraft theory is of great significance for us to understand primitive art, especially its motive force, and the non-aesthetic nature of these arts at that time.

Extended data:

Labor theory of the origin of art;

People think that art originated from labor. Representatives: Bishop, Shane, Max Desso, plekhanov. Correct: First of all, labor is the main object of primitive art, and secondly, prehistoric art has left a lot of traces of labor and production activities in both content and form.

However, paying too much attention to the direct relationship between labor and art is inevitably somewhat simplistic. Labor is the most important part of human social life, but it is not the whole of social life. The content of social life other than labor is also closely related to the occurrence of art.

In addition, the emergence of art is based on the high perfection of human hands due to labor, but the origin of art mainly refers to the driving force in the sense of sociology and psychology, that is, what is the original creative motivation of primitive people. In this sense, it is difficult to judge the role of labor and art in the origin of art.

Labor theory is one of the important theories about the origin of literature, and labor provides the premise for literary activities; The productive activities of human beings are the premise of all other basic activities. On the one hand, people can engage in other activities only after meeting their basic survival needs. On the other hand, people are produced in such production activities.

In order to create a language system with rich ideographic functions in labor, Engels said: "Labor is the first basic condition for all human activities, and it has reached such a level that in a sense, we have to say that labor creates people themselves." Secondly, labor creates the need for literary activities.

People's activities are accompanied by a conscious purpose, which is set out of some need. Third, labor constitutes an important part of our description. Finally, labor restricted the earliest literary form. The earliest literary genre of all ethnic groups is poetry, which must be sung, sung and danced. Early literature and art were a combination of poetry, music and dance.

This early literary and artistic form is directly related to the labor process. Primitive people transformed labor movements and the movements of hunted animals into dances, and chants and shouts during labor into poems. Various sounds and rhythms during labor provided musical inspiration for primitive people.

The trinity of poetry, music and dance is actually the unified embodiment of the budding factors of these art forms in the process of labor. Compared with other theories, it is more concrete and scientific, which fundamentally explains the origin of literature and provides the most fundamental theory for the origin of literature.

Baidu encyclopedia-the origin of art