Aesthetic Thought Of Sun Worship In Shu Culture

Researchers have done a lot of work to analyze ancient Shu culture and most of them were focused on sun-worship, however, very little of those studies, which analyzed the phenomena of sun-worship and the cultural connotations of it, cast a gaze into the aesthetic significance of sun-worship, which were noticed by only a few of researchers that amplified this issue through the angel of bronze arts. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the aesthetic thoughts and significance of ancient Shu culture by concentrate on facts such as religion, witchcraft, agriculture, geography, and mineral resources.The introduction part of this thesis explained the reason why sun-worship was of paramount importance in ancient Shu culture and pointed out the theoretical meaning of this thesis and the present situation of relative researches domestic and abroad. The main body of this thesis including four chapters. The first chapter introduced forms of sun-worship in Shu, which clarified the situation of sun-worship in this place by analyzing those direct and indirect patterns. The second chapter studied the aesthetic features of sun-worship in Shu from three different aspects which includes the beauty of image, the rhythm and the beauty of religion. The third chapter focused on the reasons, which related to the mysterious witchcraft, the geographical conditions, the development of agriculture and the ample resources of bronze and gold, that promoted the thought of sun-worship in this place. The last chapter concluded the aesthetic significance of sun-worship that contained three points:the high degree of aesthetic consciousness of ancient Shu individuals, those visional imaginations of them and the idea of the whole universe of ancient Shu people. In the end of this thesis I will draw a conclusion.No matter archaeological treasures or customs, ancient Shu culture took a great deal of sun-worship. Those solar totem, which were discovered in Sanxindui or Jinshadui, represented the beauty of aesthetic image by methods of exaggeration, geometry and combination. Totemism expounded the consciousness of religions of ancient Shu people and those weird formative arts contained unique aesthetic thoughts of them.