One elephant with a tusk missing, one with four too many, and what each has meant across two thousand years of Asian art.
Walk through the old temples of India, Nepal, Thailand or Tibet and you will meet elephants everywhere: holding up the corners of buildings, flanking doorways, carrying gods. Most are simply elephants, the great patient animal that every culture in the region learned to respect. Two of them are not. One has a tusk that stops halfway. The other has six.
Both are signs you can read once you know what to look for, and both say something about strength that is easy to miss the first time.
The god with one tusk
Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of Hindu tradition, is worshipped at the start of things: journeys, weddings, new houses, new ventures. He is the remover of obstacles, and also, it is said, the one who places them when they are needed. Look closely at almost any image of him and one of his tusks is broken. One of his oldest names, Ekadanta, simply means "one tusk".
How he lost it depends on who is telling the story. In the best known version, the sage Vyasa needed a scribe for the Mahabharata, one who could keep up with him without pausing. Ganesha agreed, and when his pen failed partway through, he snapped off his own tusk and went on writing with it. In another, he loses it in a fight with Parashurama and accepts the blow rather than let his father's gift be dishonoured. In a third, he breaks it off and throws it at the moon for laughing at him.
The versions disagree about the occasion, but they agree about one thing. The tusk was not taken from him by weakness. He gave it up, and was greater afterwards, not less. That is why the broken tusk is read as a sign of sacrifice made willingly, of letting go of something real so that something more important can be finished.
The elephant with six tusks
The six-tusked white elephant belongs to Buddhist tradition, and it appears at the very beginning of the Buddha's story. Before his birth, his mother, Queen Maya, dreamed that a white elephant with six tusks entered her side. The court's interpreters told her she would bear a son who would become either a great king or a great teacher. In Buddhist art the dream is painted and carved again and again; it is how you know the story has started.
The same elephant turns up in the Jataka tales, the stories of the Buddha's earlier lives. In the Chaddanta Jataka he is the king of a herd of elephants, a six-tusked giant who, when a hunter comes for his tusks, helps the man cut them off and lets him go. It is one of the most painted of all the Jataka scenes, from the caves of Ajanta onwards.
Nothing in nature has six tusks, and that is the point. Two tusks make an animal. Six take him out of the animal world altogether. He is the complete form of strength: power that has nothing left to prove and nothing left to fear, and that uses itself gently.
Two kinds of strength
Put the two side by side and they form a pair worth thinking about. One is born with everything. The other gives something up and is made greater by it. One is strength at rest; the other is strength that knows when to stop.
That pairing is how we came to make them. They are separate traditions and separate stories, but carved together they ask a question most of us spend our lives answering: when do you hold on, and when do you let go?
The elephants we carve
The Broken Tusk Elephant God Ring is carved in the round from 31 g (1.1 oz) of sterling silver, the head 32 mm (1.3 in) long and nearly 9 mm (0.35 in) proud of the finger. Both tusks are fire-gilded in 24K gold; only one is allowed to finish, the other stopping at a flat, bright break. A Swiss blue topaz sits at the front of the crown and a natural garnet at each temple.
The Six-Tusked Elephant God Ring is the same size and 32 g (1.1 oz), with six fire-gilded tusks curving forward in pairs at three depths, each pair cut free of the one behind it. In the crown, set among gold granules placed one at a time under a 40× microscope, is a single Nanhong agate.
The Six-Tusked Elephant God Cuff puts the same head at the end of a 51 g (1.8 oz) open cuff. On the inside, where the band rests against the wrist, the Eight Auspicious Symbols run in gold through silver scrollwork around a turquoise; there is more about them in The Eight Auspicious Symbols.
All three are oxidised deep in the recesses and brought back by hand on the high points, so they look less like new jewellery than like something found and kept. The gold is fused into the silver by fire rather than laid on top; how that works is explained in Traditional Fire-Gilding.
A note on what we claim
We write about these elephants as the history and stories they are. We do not claim that wearing one will remove obstacles or bring good fortune. What a ring can do is sit on the hand you reach with, as a reminder of the two kinds of strength and the difference between them.
May you know what to hold, and what to put down.
Broken Tusk Elephant God Ring · Six-Tusked Elephant God Ring · Six-Tusked Elephant God Cuff · Asian Mythology Jewelry
More from the Journal: The Eight Auspicious Symbols · Garuda in Tibet · The Vajra