Primitive Thinking and the Phenomenon of Spiritual Language Evoked by Birds in The Book of Songs

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-432-7_9How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Xing (association-evoking) in The Book of Songs; Bird images; Spiritual language; Primitive thinking

Abstract

Breaking through the existing theories in the academic circle regarding the use of bird images for xing (association-evoking) in The Book of Songs, such as the “theory of being evoked by objects to arouse emotions”, the “totem theory” and the “bird divination theory”, this paper proposes a brand-new conjecture: the “theory of spiritual language”. Using birds for association-evoking in The Book of Songs represents common people’s free expression of their personal feelings and manifests the sensitive minds of intellectuals in ancient times. The fact that ancient people and intellectuals used birds to sing and express their emotions reflects the “spiritual language” lyric mechanism commonly shared in the East Asian cultural circle in ancient times. And this “spiritual language” demonstrates the primitive thinking of our ancient ancestors in poetry: the revelation and prediction of important moments in life, the awe and fear of gods, and the law of similarity referring to the relationship between sound and objects.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xiaoyi Dong
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/06/22
TI  - Primitive Thinking and the Phenomenon of Spiritual Language Evoked by Birds in The Book of Songs
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 4th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 69
EP  - 85
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-432-7_9
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-432-7_9
ID  - Dong2025
ER  -