RITUAL BULLFIGHT—BISHOP 451 
In no one area, so far as I am aware, do all the elements of the 
ceremony appear together. Perhaps they never did so anywhere. 
Nevertheless, where the true ritual bullfight of this type occurs or 
has occurred, the fact may usually be recognized by the presence, 
with or without the combat itself, of various others of the features 
just enumerated. 
There can be little doubt that the custom had its inception on the 
continent rather than anywhere in the Indonesian area where it also 
occurs. ‘There appears to be a folk recollection of something of the 
sort in the ancient Irish legends, as for example in the famous fight 
between the Findbennach, the “ white-horned bull of Queen Medb,” 
and the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, in the Cuchulainn cycle.1? And 
Strabo informs us that at Memphis, bulls bred for the purpose were 
made to fight one another, the victor being awarded a prize. 
Instances such as these—and they might easily be multiplied—sug- 
gest an extremely ancient origin and a very wide diffusion for the 
custom. But both Ireland and Egypt he outside the typical irri- 
gated rice culture area, and the development of the rite into its more 
complex form must therefore, it would seem, be sought elsewhere. 
With India, however, the case is widely different. That there the 
growing of rice first arose seems fairly well made out. And by cer- 
tain of the aboriginal tribes, which have not yet come under the 
influence of Hinduism, bullocks and buffaloes are ritually killed and 
eaten. Furthermore, beast fights of various sorts have been held in 
India from time immemorial. Hence it is on the whole perhaps 
likely that, while the germ of the idea may have been borrowed along 
with that of taming and utilizing the zebu and the water buffalo, 
frem the more northern and almost,certainly very much older grain 
and cattle complex, this type of ritual bullfight was brought to its 
full development by the pre-Aryan populations of that country in 
connection with the culture of irrigated rice, and that it spread 
hand in hand with the latter to southeastern Asia, and so ultimately 
throughout the vast area in which it has been observed as occurring. 
But whatever the ultimate source to which the custom is to be 
traced, it seems at the present day to retain its characteristic features 
most completely among the non-Chinese hill tribes of South China.1* 
@ Regarding this see J, A. MacCulloch, “ The religion of the ancient Celts,” Edinburgh, 
1911, pp. 130 et seq. 
13 Strabo, Geogr., Bk. XVII, ch. 1, sec. 33. 
14 See, e. g., P. Aloys Schotter, ‘“ Notes ethnographiques sur les tribus du Kong-tcheou,” 
Anthropos, Vol. IV, 1909, pp. 345 et seq.; George Edgar Betts, ‘‘ Social life of the Miao 
tsi,’ Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. XXXIII, 1899- 
1900, Fasc. 2; Archibald Ross Calhoun, “Across Chrysé: being the narrative of a journey 
of exploration through the south China borderlands from Canton to Mandalay,” London 
1883, Vol. II, pp. 371, 392; John Henry Gray, ‘China: a History of the laws, manners, 
and customs of the peopile,’’ London, 1878, Vol. II, p. 307 and note 1. 
