Abstract This paper examines shamanic rock art through Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon , a Mao Dun Prize-winning novel that portrays the spiritual world of the Evenki people. The novel’s depictions of reindeer, shamans, hunters, celestial bodies, and rivers are interpreted as religious symbols and aesthetic forms that encode ritual practices, cosmological beliefs, and spiritual communication. Using textual analysis in dialogue with ethnographic comparison and a semiotic approach to visual culture, the study argues that literature can serve as a “living context” that supplements archaeology and anthropology. By situating rock art within narrative, ritual aesthetics, and collective memory, the article highlights its dynamic role as a medium of faith and art rather than a static trace. This interdisciplinary perspective demonstrates how the literary imagination reanimates sacred imagery and offers new ways of understanding the convergence of religious experience, artistic form, and cultural identity.
Abstract Examining the German artist Fidus’s Lichtgebet, this study builds off previous examinations of his work by focusing on the popular success of Lichtgebet following its breakthrough at the Free German Youth Conference in 1913. Rather than view the artist as an example of proto-Nazism or cultural pessimism, the author contends the widespread popularity of Lichtgebet was due to its effectiveness in addressing the ‘disenchantment’ felt by many Wilhelmine Germans by offering them the possibility of ‘reenchantment.’ The author contends that Fidus’s Lichtgebet , which situated a nude, androgynous youth in a redeeming embrace of a sacralised Nature, offered Wilhelmine Germans a spiritual experience in the natural body without foregoing the sanction of science, specifically evolutionary science. By doing so, Lichtgebet combined the contemporary longing for spiritual renewal with an acceptance of modern science to weld itself onto a wide variety of new forms of spirituality, leading to its success.
