Crane skin bag

[skydove]

I am just wondering about the crane skin bag and it's relevance to druid knowledge, why crane skin as opposed to say pig skin, why a crane as opposed to a heron they are both waterside birds of a similar size? Does anyone know if crane skin is good to make bags out of?
I have read about cranes in the druid animal oracle and found it is associated with longevity and secret knowledge and its association with the ogham and that the cranebag is a symbol for the womb and is a bird of the Cailleach, can anyone offer anything more?
I was pleased to hear from a birds watcher friend of mine that a flock of 30 breeding birds are seen on the Norfolk broads and more on a reserve in Suffolk, their numbers gradually increasing over the years after being pronounced extinct in Britain. The bird seems to be making its presence felt to me after beginning to work with the element of Air though a few weeks ago I could not have given you much of a description of one!

[Jarvisfamily4]

According to the book "The Bardic Handbook', by Kevin Manwaring:
"Fionn Mac Cumhail, that great culture hero of Erin, was given a bag made from crane-skin - the crane, or heron, being a divinatory bird sacted to the Druids - it's legs in flight were said to have suggested teh Ogham alphabet. Fionn obtained it from his father by 'skill and cunning'. As a child Fionn was saved from death by his grandmother, who, in the form of a crane (heron) carried him off to a great tree, where he remained protected. The crane bag was said to have been made from the skin of the enchantress Aoife, who had been transformed into a crane for two hundred years as punishment by Bov the Red, King of the Tuatha de Danann. She was the childless second wife of Lir (father of the sea-god Manannan) and filled with jealousy for his first wifes four children, planned to slay them, but instead turned them into white swans (the Children of LIr). When her crime was discovered, she herself was enchanted inot a 'witch of the air', in the form of a crane."

From what I gather in the book, the term 'crane bag' has become more of an expression than a literal interpretation (cranes/herons may even be protected, and not available for 'bagging', pardon the pun!). It seems that it is merely the term for any bag which contains the 'trinkets' that help you do your bardic arts.

My "bag" is going to be my bellydancing sword, covered with paintings and etchings of things that remind me of the historical stories I want to tell and pass on. Though you have given me an idea: put a crane somewhere on it, to represent it's being my 'crane bag'!

[DaRC]

It's also worth looking at the Crane Dance - apparently a wonderful thing to see in the wild...
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/crane/jr/DanceLikeCranes2.html

FYI they are re-introducing Cranes into the UK - so there is hope of being able to see it here.

I last saw a nesting pair in a park Crawley; which was the last thing I expected to see.

[mwyalchen]

Go back a page! - http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/crane/ ... ranes.html - that's a most wonderful video!

[skydove]

Thanks to you all for your replies. I've recently been given the Kevan Manwaring book and I've found your quote JF4. How do you like the book?
I still wonder if you can make a bag from birdskin and how you would cure it - not that I intend to I would just like to know if it was possible, I wonder if the Aborigines have tried this in Australia ? Those crane dance movements look very energetic but how wonderful if we could see something like it once again in the UK. A local birdwatcher has said that a friend of his saw a pair flying over the midlands a couple of years ago perhaps on their way to Norfolk who knows.

[moonfrog]

The first time I ever saw a heron was a foggy morning 1972. when I stayed in Dilham, Norfolk on the banks of the river Ant, every day I would keep an eye out for the heron, it was I felt, my bird, it stirred something deep within me, I later moved back to the city, and the next heron I saw was a few years later, stuffed and displayed in a window of odd little shop, cant recall what they were selling, but im rambling,

the reason im posting is I found the following article about the crane bag, that may be of interest.
the link address is
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... crane-bag/
And I am inclined to think that the heron and crane would have been treated the same by our forbears.
And a Bugout bag would be my choice rather than a bird skin bag, or even an Oxfam shop handbag, only kidding, each to their own.


“The New York Review of Books

The Crane Bag
by Alan Tucker, reply by Robert Graves


IN RESPONSE TO:

The Crane Bag from the June 29, 1967 issue

To the Editors:

As a student who has devoted several years—and will devote many more—to acquiring the linguistic, literary, mythological, and archaeological knowledge required by a practicing Celticist (not “Celtologist”), I was appalled to find Anne Ross’s significant new book reviewed by a man as ignorant and prejudiced as Robert Graves. Had I the time, I would fault his review point by point, but I shall restrain myself and touch on only the most remarkable failings.

It is nice that Graves defines words as he wishes, with the armchair anti-quarian’s disregard for usage and general understanding. Many readers are aware that the Latin word from which “pagan” is derived means essentially “of the country” but few (perhaps only one) would criticize the use of the word to denote a situation of pre- or non-Christianity. Fewer readers fully appreciate the meaning of the term “Celtic,” basically a linguistic classification for a certain group of Indo-European (will the word “Aryan” never die?) languages, of which Irish and Scots Gaelic, Welsh and Breton are the only surviving members. When used as a cultural label “Celtic” is synonymous neither with “Galates” nor with “Galli”—both of these terms being subject to severe chronological and geographical limitations—and with “Celti” (properly “Keltoi”) only with major qualifications.

Graves’s archaeology is even worse than his linguistics and lexicography. The Celts certainly invaded Asia Minor, where small numbers of them settled and were known as Galates or Galatians, and where they served as St. Paul’s pen-pals. But to speak of a Celtic invasion of Europe is nonsense: the Celts were born in Europe, in the area where both the Rhine and Danube rise, and their powerful war-oriented society was known in virtually every corner of the continent by 200 B.C. And to assert unequivocally that two waves of Celts invaded Britain at specific dates, “over-throwing the even more gifted [!] non-Aryan Bronze Age agriculturalists,” is to dismiss all the archaeological studies of the last forty years with a wave of the hand, for those studies have yet to uncover sufficient evidence definitely to pinpoint the time and place of the Celtic invasion of Britain, or to establish just how many invasions there were.

Perhaps the most distressing thing about Graves’s article is his clear anti-academic, anti-intellectual bias. There is no reason at all for his condescending treatment of Professor Ross’s field work (sneer), education and research (chortle), except as an attempt to gull his readers into the outdated belief that myths and “magical materials” require visceral, rather than cerebral, understanding; his use of the ichthyologist analogy epitomizes both Graves’s bias and his ignorance.

A few brief points may illuminate this (further: within two paragraphs Graves on one hand dismisses as irrelevant the highly significant Gaulish carving of Taurotrigaranos, and on the other throws together, like the antiquarian vacuum cleaner he is, a reference to Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (a source to be read with several pounds of salt), the finding of collars of Irish gold in Greece (Irish gold was known in Europe long before there were Celtic Irishmen), a (possibly) Mycenaean dagger engraved at Stonehenge, a totally uncertain etymology of “druid” coupled with a subliminal shift to the oracular grove at Dordona, and “certain secret straw-wrapped gifts.”

Graves then carries on for two more paragraphs with wild connections between Greece and the Celtic world, but provides no evidence to support them; later he is “tempted” to identify Taurotrigaranos with Geryon, but cannot point to significant and exclusive correspondences which would prove their identity. And he romanticizes the Ogham writing system by making “speech ciphers” out of mostly dull epigraphs.

I would agree with him that his explanation of the Crane Bag is exceedingly complicated, to the point where the bag no longer holds water, let alone its other contents, the more so because of all the “supposes” and “seems” with which the argument is supported. The paragraph beginning, “But why, you may ask…” (p. 23) should be indelibly imprinted upon the memory of every would-be mythologist as an example ever to be avoided, and to it should be added Graves’s ridiculous explanation of Etruscan cult objects as loaves of chale.

Until relatively recently this was the stuff of which mythological studies were made. Unfortunately there are still those who feel they can apprehend the meaning of ancient myths through some sort of spiritual communion with long-dead ancestors; I have seen the same done in archaeology. And all too often these people have a fixation to which all myths must eventually revert: Graves’s bag is not the Crane, it is Greece. But despite his contempt for academic mythologists, and especially archaeologists, it is these professional students who for years have laid the foundations upon which hacks can build their castles in the air.

Alan Tucker

Topanga, California

Robert Graves replies:
My piece about the Irish God Manannan’s Crane Bag [NYR, June 29] annoyed scientific archaeologists because I suggested that their task was to dig, photograph, preserve, and date new finds rather than to pronounce on their religious character: a special field reserved for those few anthropologists who happen to be poets as well.

The same piece encouraged a leading Jungian to sermonize in rotund eighteenth-century style on the esoteric, as opposed to the exoteric, meaning of the Sea-God Manannan’s Crane Bag. Dr. Jung, however, was neither a trained anthropologist nor a poet, but a psychologist. What he called the unconscious—a term first coined by my German great-grandfather, the “Natur-philosoph” Gotthilf von Schubert—is what poets regard as the true conscious: a composite of those deeper levels of consciousness upon which they draw while in their active, waking, creative trance. Psychologists are content to speculate fancifully on its nature by compiling learned studies of their patients’ dream-fantasies, and misinterpreting the always practical language of mythology. An immediate, if modest, instance of deep-level consciousness was my casually reading the Crane Bag passage quoted in Dr. Anne Ross’s Pagan Celtic Britain and finding an immediate poetic answer to its complex system of kennings which nobody, so far as I know, had been able to decipher since medieval days.

Jungians are welcome to pursue their pseudo-religious fantasies about the Crane Bag as a “psychic womb in which the hero’s positive relation to the feminine being within his nature can grow and come to life.” Or even to invent a Jonah-like voyage for Manannan in the whale’s belly: which belongs to a different mythology altogether and is quite out of context in the whale’s-back kenning. But I could, if I had time, preach an even more fascinating and inventive bedtime sermon about Parson Weems’s George Washington, the Cherry Tree and the Hatchet, which would go on and on until you all fell asleep. Let us be practical. The Crane Bag was a metaphor, drawn from the ornate chess-bags of early Irish legend, or an alphabetical secret. The alphabet consisted of the original and additional signs belonging to a deaf-and-dumb means of communication, apparently Pelasgian in origin, used by Irish poets among themselves. Their early Milesian ancestors had borrowed it from the Goddess whom the Greeks credited with its inception; and the Crane was their totem bird, as it was for Greek poets. Surely this is enough, without any speculation on the “mother complex operating negatively within a man’s nature”?”