The Crane Bag and the Domestication of Myth

The Irish myths are really weird.

They are full of grotesque details, like, when the hero Cuchulainn went into his battle frenzy he had a fountain of frozen blood six feet tall sprouting from his forehead. They loop around in time, so that a man potrayed in one story as another's father will appear later as an infant in the house of his son. People keep being transformed into animals, or dying and being reborn. Sometimes gods create people, but in other stories people create gods. There is no beginning to the unvierse, and no end, just events that echo other events in a pattern more like a four-dimensional weaving than a linear narrative.

Nineteenth-century rationalists argued that this confusion meant the stories had somehow become "corrupted." Some thought this had happened in the course of oral transmission, while others pointed to the moment when they were written down by Christian monks. I subscribe to the view that, no, they were always like this. I think these stories reflect a view of time and the universe developed by the Druids around 500 to 350 BC, when Greek philosophers were also devoting a lot of attention to time and change. The Druids ended up teaching, I think, that linear time is an illusion, and that in a universe with no beginning and no end events keeping moving in cycles that echo, but do not exactly repeat, those of other times.

This brings me to the Crane Bag. In myth there is only one Crane Bag, with a story something like this:

The celebrated bag of Irish tradition was made by Manannán mac Lir and contained many treasures. Aífe [a famous woman] is transformed into a crane by a jealous rival, Luchra; she subsequently spends 200 years in the household of Manannán mac Lir. When she dies, he uses her skin to hold things precious to him. These included his knife and shirt, the king of Scotland's shears, the king of Lochlainn's helmet, the bones of Assal's swine, and the girdle of the great whale's back. At high tide the treasures are visible in the sea, but at ebb tide they vanish. 

Ok, so, on the one hand, this sounds like a bag made of bird skin, but on the other it holds the bones of an enormous whale. Also, it fills with sea water at high tide, and the treasures in the bag are "visible in the sea;" in fact there are a couple of points on the Irish coast that are supposed to be the place from which the treasures are visible.

Many modern interpreters, going back to the eighteenth century, have argued that what the bag actually held was the letters of the Ogham alphabet. There are some obscure verses that may say the form of the letters was copied from the positions of a crane's legs, and some clever person figured out how to connect the objects in the bag (knife, shirt, shears, helmet, pig bones, girdle) to the first six Ogham letters. Well, maybe, but it sometimes seems to me that with a little work you can connect anything in the Irish stories to literally anything else, which, again, may be part of the point. Plus, these clever commentators have not been able to explain why a bag holding the alphabet has tides.

Which brings me to yesterday, when I did a quick search for Crane Bag. (Don't ask.) What I found was, not references to this arcane tradition, but ads from crane bag sellers (the one above could be yours for $75) and instructions on how to assemble the contents of your own. These are, the ads assure me, "traditionally carried by druids."

Here's one example:

My Crane Bag is the size of a small messenger bag and holds some personal spiritual talismans, a few stones and crystals that help me focus, a couple of acorns, a feather, some shells and a few odds and ends. Because I like to strike out into unpopulated spaces, I’m practical, so also carry a Swiss army knife, compass, always a notebook and a couple of pens and pencils and a pencil sharpener since words are my system of divination. The best part? There’s still enough room for my keys and wallet. I’m prepared wherever I go and don’t need to take anything else. This leaves my hands free, so I can touch trees and stones and whatever else draws me.

This is an entirely modern tradition; there is in Irish myth only one Crane Bag, and it was not carried by a druid. I am not sure when this habit of making and carrying these bags developed, but so far as I can tell it is post-World War II. The obvious source for this kind of thing is Native American spirit bundles.

Here's a modern Druid who at least understands that this is a distortion of the myth:

Symbolically speaking, the Crane Bag isn’t a bag to hold things. The concept is actually closer to the Irish version of the Grail. According to legend, it appears and disappears, shifts guardianship and even shifts worlds – from sea to land, from god to hero. The crane is associated with death and rebirth and the labyrinth path between the worlds. So when you think on that, basically, the concept encompasses all the realms and planes and really becomes a representation for the interconnectedness of everything and the unity and harmony between all things in one.

Now, I don't want to tell other people how to be spiritual, and really what they choose to carry in their $75 bags is none of my business.

But I wanted to comment on this because it represents a human tendency that I think constantly gets in the way of understanding myth: taking things literally. You know, Plato tries to tell a story about an imaginary perfect city,  and the next thing you know people are diving off the Azores and claiming to find pieces of it. The Voyage of Saint Brendan is a distorted narrative of an actual journey to America. Robin Hood was really [insert the historical Robert you prefer]. 

The basic structure of this discourse is: X is really Y. 

One of the most common forms in this genre is the search for the oldest form of a myth, the most authentic form, which is sometimes dubbed the "original" version. If there are five different stories about the great magician Math son of Mathonwy, in some of which he is clearly human, in others apparently immortal, well, there must be an original version in which he was one or the other. 

Caesar tells us that the Druids refused to write down their doctrines. I understand their thinking, because as soon as you write something down, even something as bizarre as the old Irish myths, somebody comes along as says, "Oh, you really meant this." Or, "Why is your teaching so garbled? It must have gotten corrupted. Here, let me help you reconstruct the original version."

(The druids throw up their hands and stomp away, muttering, We had better rebel against this Caesar fellow before he and all the other rationalists ruin Gaul. Call Vercingetorix.)

Sometimes X may actually be a distorted memory of Y; that happens a lot in myth. But that doesn't in any way imply that you can understand the meaning of X, to the person who told the story, by reference to Y. 

After forty years of thinking about Celtic myth, and myth in general, I believe more and more that the details of the stories matter very little. When you are presented with half a dozen similar stories about similar-sounding people, you should probably not obsess over the differences. Don't try to put them in order; don't try to figure out which is more authentic. Don't try to arrange the characters in a neat family tree. If a story makes no sense to you, maybe rather than trying to "figure it out" you should step back and ask what kind of feeling it evokes, just as it is. Let the words wash over you; let the story shock you and move you.

Don't, whatever else you do, try to put it in a bag.