The Bestiary

There is an animal called an ELEPHANT, which has no desire to copulate.
     People say that it is called an Elephant by the Greeks on account of its size, for it approaches the form of a mountain: you see, a mountain is called ‘eliphio’ in Greek. In the Indies, however, it is known by the name of ‘barrus’ because of its voice – whence both the voice is called ‘barritone’ and the tusks are called ‘ivory’ (ebur). Its nose is called a proboscis (for the bushes), because it carries its leaf-food to its mouth with it, and it looks like a snake.
     Elephants protect themselves with ivory tusks. No larger animals can be found. The Persians and the Indians, collected into wooden towers on them, sometimes fight each other with javelins as if from a castle. They possess vast intelligence and memory. They march about in herds. And they copulate back-to-back.
     Elephants remain pregnant for two years, they do not have babies more than once, nor do they have several at a time, but only one. They live three hundred years. If one of them wants to have a baby, he goes eastward toward Paradise, and there is a tree there called Mandragora, and he goes with his wife. She first takes of the tree and then gives some to her spouse. When they munch it up, it seduces them, and she immediately conceives in her womb. When the proper time for being delivered arrives, she walks out into a lake, and the water comes up to the mother’s udders. Meanwhile the father-elephant guards her while she is in labour, because there is a certain dragon which is inimical to elephants. Moreover, if a serpent happens by, the father kills and tramples on it till dead. He is also formidable to bulls – but he is frightened by mice, for all that.
     The Elephant’s nature is that if he tumbles down he cannot get up again. Hence it comes that he leans against a tree when he wants to go to sleep, for he has no joints in his knees. This is the reason why a hunter partly saws through a tree, so that the elephant, when he leans against it, may fall down at the same time as the tree. As he falls, he calls out loudly; and immediately a large elephant appears, but it is not able to lift him up. At this they both cry out, and twelve more elephants arrive upon the scene: but even they cannot lift up the one who has fallen down. Then they all shout for help, and at once there comes a very Insignificant Elephant, and he puts his mouth with the proboscis under the big one, and lifts him up. This little elephant has, moreover, the property that nothing evil can come near his hairs and bones when they have been reduced to ashes, not even a Dragon.
     Now the Elephant and his wife represent Adam and Eve. For when they were pleasing to God, before their provocation in the flesh, they knew nothing about copulation not had they knowledge of sin. When, however, the wife ate of the Tree of Knowledge, which is what Mandragora means, and gave one of the fruits to her man, she was immediately made a wanderer and they had to clear out of Paradise, Adam did not know her. But then, the Scriptures say: ‘Adam went in to his wife and she conceived and bore Cain, upon the waters of tribulation’. Of which waters the Psalmist cries: ‘Save me, O God, for the waters have entered in even unto my soul’. And immediately the dragon subverted them and made them strangers to God’s refuge. This is what comes of not pleasing God.
     When the Big Elephant arrives, i.e. the Hebrew Law, and fails to lift up the fallen, it is the same as when the Pharisee failed with the fellow who had fallen among thieves. Nor could the Twelve Elephants, i.e. the Band of the Prophets, lift him up, just as the Levite did not lift the man we mentioned. But it means that Our Lord Jesus Christ, although he was the greatest, was made the most Insignificant of All the Elephants. He humiliated himself, and was made obedient even unto death, in order that he might raise men up.
     The little elephant also symbolizes the Samaritan who put the man on his mare. For he himself, wounded, took over our infirmities and carried them from us. Moreover, this heavenly Samaritan is interpreted as the Defender about whom David writes: ‘The Lord defending the lowly ones’. Also, with reference to the little elephant’s ashes: ‘Where the Lord is present, no devil can come nigh’.
     It is a fact that Elephants smash whatever they wind their noses round, like the fall of some prodigious ruin, and whatever they squash with their feet they blot out.
     They never quarrel about 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 into familiar paths. If they are gathered together into crowded herds, they make way for themselves with tender and placid trunks, lest any of their tusks should happen to kill some animal on the road. If by chance they do become involved in battles, they take no little care of the casualties, for they collect the wounded and exhausted into the middle of the herd.

(Text from T H White's 'Book of Beasts'; image own).