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Freud and Reik have demonstrated that many of our modern rituals, such as the Catholic wafer sacrament, are compulsive survivals of the primal killing and eating of the father. We will now attempt to show that the bull-fight, a particularly bloody and brutal game, is also traceable to the original parricide.
It is well-known that Greek tragedy originated in a religious ceremony in which a bull was killed and eaten.
“… a great procession is led forth …. The Bull is sacrificed, and why? Why must a thing so holy die? … He dies because he is so holy, that he may give his holiness, his strength, his life, just at the moment it is holiest, to his people.”*
In commenting upon the animal sacrifice as the origin of Greek tragedy, Freud wrote:
“But why did the hero of the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the meaning of his “tragic' guilt… He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the hero of that primordial tragedy … and the tragic guilt is the guilt which he had to take upon himself in order to free the chorus of their's.”**
We are therefore interested when Ernest Hemingway writes:
“The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word…. Rather it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved and in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal.”***