But this strange, paradoxical nature has made people identify intensely with the elephant, since the animal seems to share with humans an alienation from the natural world. Cicero wrote in the first century B.C. that “although there is no animal more sagacious than the elephant, there is also none more monstrous in appearance” (book 1, section 97). No other animal has been so intensely and consistently anthropomorphized. The eyes of an elephant are disproportionately small and on opposing sides of the head, but the folds about the eyes give them enormous expressiveness. Their gaze can be so intense that one popular book on ani-mals in the late twentieth century was entitled When Elephants Weep, despite the fact that crying is a human trait that elephants do not actually share.

Pliny the Elder spoke for many when he said the elephant was the animal “closest to man as regards intelligence” and added that “the elephant has qualities rarely apparent even in man, namely honesty, good sense, justice, and also respect for the stars, sun, and moon” (book 8, chap. 1). One traditional description of humanity is “homo religiosus,” but elephants, according to tradition, share even the religious impulse. Pliny wrote that elephants would come down from the mountains of Mauritania to bathe in the river Alimo and pay homage to the moon. This theme was frequently repeated in Christian Europe, where the religious impulse of elephants was regularly praised and their paganism ignored. In the latter eighteenth century, Marcel LeRoy, forester to the king of France, wrote that “many authors say this animal is lacking in nothing but the worship of God, while others accord it that virtue as well” (vol. 3, p. 99). Even today, the debate as to whether elephants are religious has not been entirely resolved. For centuries, elephants have been said to bury their dead, and researchers in the latter twentieth century confirm that they at least cover their dead with vegetation.

Most of our elephant lore comes from India, where the elephant may have been domesticated as early as the middle of the third millennium B.C. According to the Indians, after the sun had been hatched from a cosmic egg, the god Brahma took the two shells in his hands and began to chant. Out of the shells emerged the elephant Airavata, which later became the mount of the god Shiva, followed by fifteen other cloud elephants. They and their progeny could fly about and change their shape at will. One day, however, the young elephants on earth became too boisterous and disturbed the sage Palakapya, who cursed them and relegated them to the ground. Up through at least the nineteenth century, elephants continued to be accorded superhuman abilities, including total recall and life spans of centuries. But even as these ideas have been debunked, remarkable new qualities of elephants have been discovered. People had long puzzled over the social cohesion of elephants, and in the 1980s researchers discovered they communicate with ultrasound-that is, by means of frequencies inaccessible to the human ear. Among the most beloved deities of the Hindu pantheon is Ganesha, the mischievous god of wisdom, who has a human body and an elephant head. He is usually depicted riding on a rat and has a potbelly and a broken tusk. There are many stories that explain his origin and odd appearance. According to one, when the god Siva was away, his consort Parvati was lonely and desired a son. She covered her body with scented lotion, rubbed off the dirt, formed it into a young man, and directed him to guard her home. After a while Siva returned and demanded admittance. The young man refused to let him pass. A fight ensued and Siva beheaded his adversary. When she saw what had happened, Parvati was so furious that she threatened to destroy the entire world if Siva did not restore her son to life. To do this Siva needed another head, so he sent his servants in search of one. They came upon an enormous elephant, decapitated the animal, and returned to their master, who placed the head of the elephant on the body of the young man.

Among the incarnations of Buddha was an albino elephant, and such animals are traditionally held in great honor in Southeast Asia. The conception of Gautama, who was to become Buddha, resembles that of Christ, but the mediator of that virgin birth was not a dove but an elephant. Queen Sirimahamaya dreamed that she had been transported to a palace on a mountain peak. An elephant, bearing a lotus, approached her and bowed. She heard the call of a bird and awoke, pregnant with the redeemer.

The elephant entered European awareness at the battle of Hydaspes, when Alexander the Great invaded India and faced King Porus, whose army included 200 mounted elephants. Alexander was finally victorious, but the power of the elephants so awed his troops that his generals refused to venture any farther east. At the end of the third century B.C., Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus in Greece, used elephants to defeat the Romans in several battles until his outnumbered army was finally overwhelmed. In 219 B.C. the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps with an army that included elephants and inflicted many defeats on the Romans, though his troops, too, finally succumbed to the superior numbers and discipline of the Romans. It is interesting that the Romans, despite experiencing the damage elephants inflicted in battle, rarely included these animals in their legions. One reason may be that the Romans were aware of the military limitations of elephants, which, even when trained, were unpredictable in battle.

The reason may also be simply that the Romans were too fond of elephants to use them in such a manner. They were slain in Roman circuses, but the spectacles were not very popular. Pliny recorded that on seeing one elephant killed with a javelin in the arena at a festival organized by Pompey, the other elephants tried to break through iron railings. The resulting loss of popular support, Pliny believed, was partly responsible for Pompey’s defeat by Julius Caesar not long afterward.

Harun ar-Rashid gave an elephant as a gift to Charlemagne and his court. A few European princes of the late Middle Ages imported elephants as exotic trophies, to display their splendor and power. In general, Europeans of the Middle Ages knew elephants only through ancient books and confused reports by mariners, but the animals were far from forgotten. As their physical presence vanished, their symbolic importance increased, and no painting of Noah and the Flood was complete without an elephant.

According to one medieval bestiary, elephants lived for hundreds of years. Other bestiaries held that when an elephant couple wanted to have a child, they would go eastward toward Paradise until they came to the Mandragora, the Tree of Knowledge. First, the elephant wife would eat from the tree. Then she would give some of the fruit to her husband, at which point the two would copulate and immediately conceive. The elephants were like the first Adam and Eve, except that the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was not forbidden to them and they could freely enter or leave the Garden of Eden. The author also says of elephants, “They never quarrel with their wives, for adultery is unknown to them. There is a mild gentleness about them, for, if they happen to come across a forwandered man in the deserts, they offer to lead him back to familiar paths” (White, p. 28). In most of the Arab world, the elephant was only slightly less exotic than in the West, and it was held in much the same high regard. The seventh voyage of Sinbad the sailor, from the medieval Arabian Nights Entertainments, contains an episode that anticipates modern ecological and humanitarian concerns. After Sinbad is captured by pirates and sold into slavery, at the direction of his new master he hides in a tree and shoots arrows at a herd of elephants to obtain their tusks for ivory. This continues for a few days, but then the elephants surround him and uproot the tree. Sinbad expects the elephants to kill him, but instead they take him to their graveyard so that he may peacefully obtain their ivory.

Meanwhile, in Africa, elephants were very much a physical reality, and the practical problems of living alongside the animals restricted their appropriation in fantasy or symbolism. They were a co-pious source of meat but also a formidable challenge to hunters. An Ashanti proverb goes, “If you follow an elephant, you don’t have to knock the dew from the grass” (Courlander, p. 131). Strength and power rarely go together with cunning in folklore, and African tales often present the elephant as mighty but naive. According to a Mbochi tale, the animals once selected the elephant as their king. As the elephant was going to his coronation, the hare lay in his path and pretended to be terribly ill. The elephant did not wish the hare to miss the great event and lifted the little fellow upon his back. When they reached the council of animals, the hare protested that the elephant had carried him on his back-as the rider, he was superior to the beast of burden. The animals crowned not the elephant but the hare as king.

Africans traditionally hunted elephants primarily for meat, so both the danger and the bounty obtained from a single kill kept slaughter within limits. With colonization and the advent of modern weapons, the demand for ivory has placed the once vast populations of elephants in danger. Desperate to stop poaching, some African governments in the latter twentieth century have imposed the death penalty for killing elephants. Elephants are accorded an ironically human status, both as objects of slaughter and protection.