ABSTRACT
The chapter contains an analysis of artworks by the Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte and the Italian artist de Chirico in the context of paleoanthropological studies of the origins of art and psychological studies on magical thinking. These studies suggest that art originated from the belief of early humans that next to the ordinary earthly world there exists a magical supernatural world in which the souls of dead people and animals dwell. In order to visualise and represent this magical world, humans created special objects – drawings, sculpture, architecture and abstract signs and symbols. In the course of history, the belief in the magical world was replaced by official monotheistic religions, and in many modern individuals by the belief in science. The sense of the magical was transformed into the sense of the aesthetical, and the representation of the supernatural in the form of rock paintings and figurines carved from bone and stone changed into modern art. Yet recent studies on magical thinking have shown that in modern urban inhabitants the belief in magic did not cease to exist, but rather descended into the subconscious. Although our conscious mind denies the existence of magic, our subconscious mind still believes that beyond the known world lies the invisible world of the supernatural. In this invisible world the laws of magic, and not the laws of science, hold sway. De Chirico and Magritte’s paintings are the ‘wormholes’ that give modern rational people access to their hidden belief in the world of the supernatural, the existence of which modern science denies.
