Order of the Elephant current form on 1 December 1693 by King Christian V as having only one class consisting of only 30 noble knights in addition to the Grand Master (i.e., the king) and his sons. The statutes of the order were amended in 1958 by a Royal Ordinance so that both men and women could be members of the order. The elephant and castle design derives from an elephant carrying a howdah, the familiar castle replacing the unfamiliar howdah, and finds use elsewhere in European iconography, as discussed at howdah. The Danish monarch is the head of the order. The members of
The Elephant in the Dark – Christianity, Islam and the Sufis that his books form a complete course that could fulfil the function he had fulfilled while alive. As such, "The Elephant in the Dark" can be read as part of a whole course of study. The title, "The Elephant in the Dark", is from the traditional Eastern fable of the blind men and an elephant, in which different people experience an elephant differently according to their subjectivities. Award-winning writer and later winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing writes that it is used here to refer to “the long interaction between Christianity and Islam, even during the