Elephant in Myths, Mythology and Folklore

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.