THE RITUAL BULLFIGHT? 
By C. W. BisHop 
[With one plate] 
The custom of holding public contests between two bulls, or 
between bulls and men, is a very ancient and widespread one, con- 
fined to no particular age or ethnic group. Its origin is apparently 
to be sought in one or another form of nature worship, and, where 
its primitive significance has not been obliterated or at least blurred 
through the influence of more developed religious ideas, it almost 
invariably forms part of a ritual observance intended either to pro- 
mote the fertility of the crops or to forecast the amount of their 
yield. In other words, the custom is closely interwoven with the 
origin and growth of the practice of true agriculture, which implies 
the use of the plow and the possession of domestic animals, especially 
the ox, the plow animal par excellence in all agricultural communi- 
ties down to quite modern times. 
That form of the usage in which the contest takes place between 
men and bulls appears to center in a general way about the Mediter- 
ranean area, around which it formerly had a very wide extension, 
dating perhaps as far back as late Neolithic times. The Cretan 
representations of contests between bulls and young men and women 
are well known. The Berbers of North Africa are said to have had 
a similar custom prior to the Mohammedan invasion. The occur- 
rence upon the prehistoric Egyptian slate palettes of the motif of a 
water buffalo? goring and trampling a man suggests that a similar 
practice once prevailed on the banks of the lower Nile. That the 
custom lasted in Greece and Asia Minor well down into the historical 
period we know from the classical writers, who speak of the rite of 
the Taurokathapsia, literally “bull baiting,’* held in honor of 
Poseidon at Smyrna and Sinope, as well as in Ionia and Thessaly. 
In England the custom, originally of ceremonial significance and 
1 Reprinted by permission from The China Journal of Science and Arts, vol. III, No. 12, 
December, 1925, pp. 630-637. 
2For representations of these very interesting palettes, see H. R. Hall, ‘‘ The ancient 
history of the Near Hast,’’ New York, 1913, pl. vi, p. 82. It is clearly the water buffalo 
and not the bull which is here depicted. On the occurrence of the water buffalo in North 
Africa in prehistoric times at least as far west as Algeria, sce J. Ulrich Duerst, L’Anthro- 
pologie, vol. XI, 1900, Notes sur quelques bovidés préhistoriques, p. 137. 
4 From ravpos, bull, and xafarroun, to Jay hold of, to irritate. Poseidon seems originally to have 
been a god of fertilizing springs and of vegetation; hence his epithet of durdApmos, producing, nourish- 
ing, fostering. 
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