The Transformation of Supreme Deity Worship and the Decline of the Taotie Motif from Late Shang to Early Western Zhou China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54691/97kk3v30Keywords:
Shang dynasty, Zhou dynasty, taotie motif, Shangdi, Tian, shamanism, bronze art, religious transformation, Mandate of Heaven, visual culture, oracle bone inscriptions, ritual vessels, divine authority, Chinese civilization.Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between religious change and artistic transformation in the period between the Shang (c. 1600-1046 BCE) and Western Zhou (1046-771 BCE) dynasties, and how the change of Shangdi to Tian worship led to the deterioration of the taotie motif in bronze ornamentation. The study uses oracle bone and bronze inscription texts and archaeological data to follow how the concept of supreme deities evolved and how it was reflected in material culture. The anthropomorphic Shangdi of the Shang dynasty demanded shamanic intercession by means of divination and offerings, which were depicted in the fierce, complicated taotie designs that filled ritual bronzes. These motifs were marked by large eyes, relief, and supernatural urgency, and they functioned as visual parts of shamanic cosmology and divinity speech. The Tian innovation of the Zhou as an abstract, morally normative supreme authority radically transformed religious practice by stressing virtue-based rule via the Mandate of Heaven over and above shamanism-based mediation. This theological change directly led to the artistic decadence of taotie iconography, which was simplified, pushed to the margins, and later displaced by geometric designs, ancestor imagery and historical texts. The paper illustrates that the loss of the taotie reflects not only aesthetic evolution but also a basic rationalization of religious power, the earliest form of a rationalized political symbolism replacing shamanic visual culture in the material record.
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