Where Gods Dwell? Part I: Spatial Imagery in Children’s Drawings of Gods

AbstractSupernatural agents, although imagined by humans as omnipresent, cannot escape being placed (at least mentally) by believers somewhere in physical space. For example, kami in Shintoism are believed to reside in natural elements of the landscape. In Christianity, God is typically associated with Heaven. Similarly, Jesus is said to have ascended into Heaven after his resurrection. According to Buddhist mythology, gods live in the heavens, and the next Buddha, Maitreya, will descend to earth from heaven.This study (Part I of a two-part project) investigates the role of spatiality in children’s conceptions of the divine as shown through their drawings of god. We collected drawings by participants from four different cultural and religious environments (n = 1156): Japanese (Buddhism and Shinto), Russian-Buryat (Buddhism, Shamanism), Russian Slavic (Christian Orthodoxy) and French-speaking Swiss (Catholic and reformed Christianity). Our study indicates that the tendency to place god in the sky was not strongly related to a particular cultural or religious context. Children from all groups most often drew god either in the sky or with no background at all. We note two implications for folk psychology: (1) Children tend to conceptualize god in single location, (2) They often associate the divine with a celestial background.