Elephants in Cultures & Religions

Temple Elephants

Throughout Asia there are many elephants associated with religions and temples. These are basically of two kinds: living elephants and statuary elephants or elephant deities. The living elephants participate in religious ceremonies. Below are two photos of living temple elephants captured from web sources. A search turned up more than one and a half million hits for temple elephants. These decorated elephants were photographed at Tirupati, India by Ilya Mauter who posted it at wikimedia commmons and permits use of it under the Creative Commons License.. This row of caparisoned temple elephants was photographed during Thrissur pooram festival in Kerala state of south India by Rajesh Kakkanatt who posted it at wikimedia commmons and permits use of it under the GNU License. [ I, the copyright holder of this work, have published or hereby publish it under the following license: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. ]	Shown above are two examples from the Art Explosion 4 clip art collection. These are somewhere in Asia but the file names/credits do not indicate exact location.
The large photo above is from Swaminarayan Akshardham's web site and is copyrighted by them. We offer it solely for educational purposes under fair use doctrine. www.akshardham.com offers a marvelous photo gallery of the temple supported by large elephant statues.

Throughout Asia there are many elephants associated with religions and temples. These are basically of two kinds: living elephants and statuary elephants or elephant deities. The living elephants participate in religious ceremonies.

Below are two photos of living temple elephants captured from web sources. A search turned up more than one and a half million hits for temple elephants.

These decorated elephants were photographed at Tirupati, India by Ilya Mauter who posted it at wikimedia commmons and permits use of it under the Creative Commons License..

This row of caparisoned temple elephants was photographed during Thrissur pooram festival in Kerala state of south India by Rajesh Kakkanatt who posted it at wikimedia commmons and permits use of it under the GNU License.
[ I, the copyright holder of this work, have published or hereby publish it under the following license: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. ]

Shown above are two examples from the Art Explosion 4 clip art collection. These are somewhere in Asia but the file names/credits do not indicate exact location.

The large photo above is from Swaminarayan Akshardham's web site and is copyrighted by them. We offer it solely for educational purposes under fair use doctrine. www.akshardham.com offers a marvelous photo gallery of the temple supported by large elephant statues.

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