Elephants and Religion
When Pulter describes elephants worshiping the sun, she echoes accounts in natural histories and elsewhere that credit the elephant with piety and a sense of ritual. These accounts probably had their basis in fact: elephants do indeed exhibit ritualistic behaviors especially in grieving their dead.
Michel de Montaigne credits elephants among other nonhuman creatures with a religious sense:
We may also say that the elephants have some participation of religion forasmuch as after several washings and purifications they are observed to lift up their trunk like arms, and, fixing their eyes towards the rising of the sun, continue long in meditation and contemplation, at certain hours of the days, of their own motion; without instruction or precept.
Edward Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts also allows that elephants may have a spiritual life. Immediately after noting that elephants recognize and reverence true kings, he points out their religious rituals:
They have also a kind of religion, for they worship, reverence, and observe the course of the sun, moon, and stars; for when the moon shineth, they go to the waters wherein she is apparent; and when the sun ariseth they salute and reverence his face: and it is observed in Ethiopia that when the moon is changed until her prime and appearance, these beasts by a secret motion of nature take boughs from off the trees they feed upon and first of all lift them up to heaven and then look upon the moon, which they do many times together, as it were in supplication to her. In like manner they reverence the Sun rising, holding up their trunk or hand to heaven, in congratulations of her rising.
The connections between reverence for kings and reverence for divinity are manifold: first, in early modern estimation the innate ability to perceive a monarch’s distinct place as God’s appointed representative on earth—in effect, seeing God in the king—was a “rational” ability that right-thinking humans would possess, which then translates among nonhuman creatures into an equivalent awareness. Like humans, elephants know what a crown signifies, and respect that message. Second, an elephant is depicted in Topsell’s text as understanding that the celestial objects it sees, the sun and moon, have an outsized power over terrestrial conditions and forces, one that makes them worthy of reverence. Finally, because the sun was typically used in popular literature like stage plays (which had to skirt the censoring of religious references) as a homophonic stand-in for the “Son” or Christ, an elephant’s ritual obeisance to sun and moon could hint that it is quasi-Christian—a suspicion enhanced by its reputation for mercy, moral uprightness, and even some degree of reason.
Montaigne goes beyond these hints to undermine human hubris about access to religious faith:
[B]ecause we do not see any such signs in other animals, we cannot for that conclude that they are without religion, nor make any judgment of what is concealed from us. As we discern something in this action which the philosopher Cleanthes [Greek Stoic philosopher] took notice of, because it something resembles our own.
That is, Montaigne argues we cannot with certainty reject the idea that any animal might, like the elephant, have spiritual experiences and rituals analogous to human religion.
Seventeeth-century poet William Shipton sets elephant sun-worship alongside the myth of the heliotrope, the flower that resulted when Clite, a water nymph, died pining for Helios.
[T]he elephant adores the sun in rejoicing under those glorious rays […]
[W]ith the Elephant I will rejoice, to hover under such blazing sunshine. Tapers thus adumbrate their light at the Meridian candor, of a Torch, and Stars in their highest Orbs, thinks it an honor to be shadows of a morning Phoebus. Love it is not the only prerogative of men, but other inferior creatures have it in a natural endowement: Hence Clite salutes the sun with her golden leaves, enveloping the bright radiums of heat, evaporated from his rosy wings, in the christal cabinet of her chaste bosom, till she becomes a vagative [wandering] star.
Heliotropes appear elsewhere in Pulter’s poems, significant for the fact that their vivid blue flowers are believed to follow the sun: in The Garden, or the Contention of Flowers12, the heliotrope joins other flowers to argue for its supreme status on this basis, while in Heliotropians (Emblem 3)69, the flower’s constant focus on the sun represents transcendent religious devotion.
Elephants’ religious significance was enhanced by their supposed deep enmity with “serpents” (or dragons, with the two terms used interchangeably); that is, they were believed to be at war with the animal commonly used as a symbol for evil. Pliny describes their enmity this way:
[They] keep up a continual feud and warfare with them, the serpents also being of so large a scale that they easily encircle the elephants in their coils and fetter them with a twisted knot. In this duel both combatants die tougher, and the vanquished elephant in falling crushes with its weight the snake coiled round it … What other cause could anybody adduce for such a quarrel save Nature arranging a match between a pair of combatants to provide herself with a show? (8. Xi-xii)
Topsell elaborates on this lore:
There are Dragons among the Ethiopians which are thirty yards or paces long, these have no name among the inhabitants but Elephant-killers. And among the Indians also there is as an inbred and native hateful hostility between Dragons and Elephants.
Elephants were not the only animals believed to be capable of spiritual feeling. In his treatise on bees, Charles Butler recounts the tale of a woman who snuck the communion host into her ailing beehives:
The woman … sawe there (most strange to be seene) a chappel built by the bees with an altar in it, the walls adorned by most marvelous skil of architecture with windowes conveniently set in their places; also a door and a steeple with bels, and the host being laid upon the altar, the bees making a sweet noise round about it.
Butler, like Pulter is willing to entertain the notion that nonhuman animals, even insects like bees, might recognize and respond to the presence of divinity.