Natural and Supernatural Agents: Children’s Representations of Gods and Dead Entities

Abstract

When children face the task of having to draw something related to human death, their drawings are based on imaginary, figurative and schematic resources. These representations usually reveal children’s resolution of two fundamental problems regarding the comprehension of death; (a) which type of entity dies with death? (b) what are the characteristics of the space of the dead? From child’s perspective, what dies with death, and the place of the dead, are regulated by a specific legality, different from the one prevailing in his daily life. The physical, biological and psychological principles that children recognize as necessary in everyday experience are cancelled, inverted or alternated with death. This subversion becomes evident in drawings and is analogous to the one found in children’s representations of deities, supernatural agents, and divine spaces. The cognitive and figurative correspondence between the attributes children confer to the dead, the gods and the spaces they inhabit are analysed and discussed using data from two exploratory studies conducted in Argentina, with children from agnostic, atheist and Christian families. We address three broad axes: what, where and how children draw dead and supernatural entities, highlighting the te Luoreda Lamas, 2001; ndency towards anthropomorphization, the inaccessibility of the places inhabited by these beings and the attribution of non-normal capacities.