The Arioi, minstrels of the tropics--Lovaina tells of the
infanticide--Theories of depopulation--Methods of the Arioi--Destroyed
by missionaries.
Lovaina came out to Mataiea with the news and gossip of the capital. A
wretched tragedy had shocked the community. Pepe, the woman of
Tuatini, had buried her new-born infant alive in the garden of the
house opposite the Tiare Hotel. Lovaina was full of the horror of
it, but with a just appreciation of the crime as a happening worth
telling. The chefferie was filled with aues.
"Aue!" cried Haamoura, the chief's wife.
"Aue!" said the chief, and Rupert Brooke, with whom I had been
swimming.
"Aue!" exclaimed O'Laughlin Considine, the Irish poet of New Zealand,
stout, bearded, crowned with a chaplet of sweet gardenias, and quoting
verses in Maori, Gaelic, and English.
There were laments in Tahitian by all about, sorrow that the mother
had so little loved her babe, that she had not brought it to Mataiea,
where Tetuanui and Haamoura or any of us would have adopted it. And
Lovaina said, in English for Considine, whom she had brought to
Mataiea, and for Brooke:
"She had five children by that Tuatini. He is custom-officer at
Makatea, phosphate island, near T'ytee. He been gone one year, an' she
get very fat, but she don' say one thing. Then she get letter speakin'
he come back nex' week. One ol' T'ytee woman she work for her to keep
all chil'ren clean, an' eat, an' she notice two day ago one mornin'
she more thin. She ask her, 'Where that babee?' She say the varua,
a bad devil, take it. The ol' woman remember she hear little cry in
night, an' when a girl live my hotel tell her she saw Pepe diggin'
in garden, she talk and talk, an' by 'n' by police come, an' fin'
babee under rose-bush. It dead, but Cassiou, he say, been breathe
when bury, because have air in lung. Then gendarme take hol' Pepe,
and she tell right out she 'fraid for her husban', an' when babee born
she go in night an' dig hole an' plant her babee under rosebush. Now,
maybe white people say that Pepe jus' like all T'ytee woman."
Lovaina wore a wine-colored peignoir, and in her red-brown hair
many strands of the diaphanous reva-reva, delicate and beautiful, a
beloved ornament taken from the young palm-leaf. O'Laughlin Considine
and Brooke were much concerned for the unhappy mother, and asked how
she was.
"She cut off her hair," answered Lovaina, "like I do when my l'i'l boy
was killed in cyclone nineteen huner' six. It never grow good after
like before." Her hair was quite two feet long and very luxuriant,
and like all Tahitian hair, simply in two plaits.
Brooke expressed his curiosity over what Lovaina had said, "jus'
like all T'ytee woman."
"Was that a custom of Tahiti mothers, to bury their babes alive at
birth?" he asked.
Lovaina blushed.
"Better you ask Tetuanui 'bout them Arioi," she replied confusedly.
The chief pleaded that he could not explain such a complicated matter
in French, and if he did, M. Considine would not understand that
language. But with the question raised, the conversation continued
about infanticide and depopulation. The chief quoted the death-sentence
upon his race pronounced by the Tahitian prophets centuries ago:
"E tupu te fau, et toro te farero, e mou te taata!"
"The hibiscus shall grow, the coral spread, and man shall cease!"
"There were, according to Captain Cook, sixty or seventy thousand
Tahitians on this island when the whites came," continued the chief,
sadly. "That number may have been too great, for perhaps Tooti
calculated the population of the whole island by the crowd that always
followed him, but there were several score thousand. Now I can count
the thousands on the fingers of one hand."
We talked of the sweeping away of the people of the Marquesas
Islands and of all the Polynesians. The Hawaiians are only twenty-two
thousand. When the haole set foot on shore there, he counted four
hundred thousand.
Time was when so great was the congestion in these islands, as in
the Marquesas and Hawaii, that the priests and chiefs instituted
devices for checking it. Infanticide seemed the easiest way to
prevent hurtful increase. Stringent rules were made against large
families. On some islands couples were limited to two children or
only one, and all others born were killed immediately. Race suicide
had here its simplest form. The Polynesian race must have grown to
very great numbers on every island they settled from Samoa to Hawaii,
and perhaps these numbers induced migrations. They doubtless grew to
threatening swarms before they began checking the increase. Thomas
Carver, professor of political economy at Harvard, says:
Even if the wants of the individual never expanded at all, it is quite
obvious that an indefinite increase in the number of individuals in
any locality would, sooner or later, result in scarcity and bring
them into conflict with nature, and, therefore, into conflict with
one another. That human populations are physiologically capable of
indefinite increase, if time be allotted, is admitted, and must be
admitted by any one who has given the slightest attention to the
subject. Among the non-economizing animals and plants, it is not the
limits of their procreative power but the limits of subsistence which
determine their numbers. Neither is it lack of procreative power which
limits numbers in the case of man, the economic animal. With him also
it is a question of subsistence, but of subsistence according to some
standard. Being gifted with economic foresight he will not multiply
beyond the point where he can maintain that standard which he considers
decent. But--and this is especially to be noted--so powerful are his
procreative and domestic instincts that he will multiply up to the
point where it is difficult to maintain whatever standard he has.
Instinct early taught society everywhere protection against the irksome
condition of too many people and too little food. The old were killed
or deserted in wanderings or migrations, and infanticide and abortion
practised, as they are commonly in Africa to-day. Six-sevenths of India
have for ages practised female infanticide, yet India increases two
millions annually, and famine stalks year in and year out. Fifteen
million Chinese are doomed to die of starvation in 1921, according
to official statements.
Able-bodied adults in their prime bear the burdens of society
everywhere. The elders and their children are a burden on them,
especially in primitive society, where capital is not amassed, and
food must be procured by some labor, either of the chase, fishing,
or gathering fruits and herbs. Only advance in economic power has
arrested infanticide. The Greeks thought it proper; the Romans,
too. The early Teutons exposed babes. The Chinese have always done so.
Procreation, if not a dominant passion, would probably have ceased
long ago, and the race perished. Individual and even national "race
suicide" in France and New England indicated the possibilities of
this tendency. The teachings of asceticism which had such power
among Christians until the sixteenth century are again heard under a
different guise in at least one of the modern cults most successful
in the United States. Neo-Malthusianism is found exemplified in the
two-child families of the nobles of France and Germany and the rich
of New England. Parents want to do more for children, and so have
fewer, and think proper contraception and even killing the foetus in
its early stages. Modern medicine has aided this. Many women in many
countries for ages have practised abortion in order not to spoil their
bodies by child-bearing. To-day the demands of fashion and of social
pleasures have caused large families to be considered even vulgar
among the extremists in the mode. Organizations incited by the new
feminism send heralds of contraception schemes on lecture tours to
instruct the proletariat, and brave women to go to prison for giving
the prescription. The well-to-do have always been cognizant of it.
The Tahitians have ever been adoring of little ones, and if
their annals are stained by the blood of innumerable innocents
murdered at birth, let it be remembered that it was a law, and not a
choice of parents--a law induced by the sternest demands of social
economy. Religion or the domination of priests commanded it. They
obeyed, as Abraham did when he began to whet his knife for his son
Isaac. To-day in Europe conditions prescribe conduct. Morality fades
before race demands. Polygamy or promiscuity looms a possibility,
and may yet have state and church sanction, as in Turkey.
In Tahiti, from time immemorial, as native annals went, there was
a wondrous set of men and women called Arioi who killed all their
children, and whose ways and pleasures recall the phallic worshipers of
ancient Asian days. Forgotten now, with accounts radically differing as
to its composition, its aims, and even its morals, a hundred romances
and fables woven about its personnel, and many curious hazards upon
its beginnings and secret purposes, the Arioi society constitutes
a singular mystery, still of intense interest to the student of the
cabalistic, though buried with these South Sea Greeks a century ago.
The Arioi, in its time of divertisement, was a lodge of strolling
players, musicians, poets, dancers, wrestlers, pantomimists, and
clowns, the merry men and women of the Pacific tropics. They were
the leaders in the worship of the gods, the makers and masters of the
taboo, and when war or other necessity called them from pleasure or
religion, the leaders in action and battle.
The ending of the celebrated order came about through the work of
English Christian missionaries and the commercialized conditions
accompanying the introduction among the Tahitians of European
standards, inventions, customs, and prohibitions. The institution was
of great age, without written chronicles, and, like all Polynesian
history, obscured by the superstitions bred of oral descent.
"The Arioi have been in Tahiti as long as the Tahitians," said the
old men to the first whites.
Of all the marvels of the South Seas unfolded by their discovery to
Europeans, and their scrutiny by adventurers and scientists, none seems
so striking and so provocative of curiosity as the finding in Tahiti
of a sect thoroughly communistic in character, with many elements of
refinement and genius, which obliterated the taboos against women, and
though nominally for the worship of the generative powers of nature,
mixed murder and minstrelsy in its rites and observance. For what wrote
red the records of this society in the journals of the discoverers,
missionaries, and early European dwellers in Tahiti, was the Arioi
primary plank of membership--that no member should permit his or her
child to live after birth. As at one time the Arioi society embraced
a fifth of the population, and had unbounded influence and power,
this stern rule of infanticide had to do with the depopulation of
the island, or, rather, the prevention of overpopulation. Yet while
the Arioi had existed as far back as their legends ran, Captain Cook,
as said Tetuanui, estimated the Tahitians to number seventy thousand
in 1769. The chronicles say that the bizarre order was rooted out
a hundred years ago. There are barely five thousand living of this
exquisite race, which the white had found without disease, happy,
and radiantly healthy. Evidently the Arioi had merely preserved a
supportable maximum of numbers, and it remained for civilization to
doom the entire people.
The Arioi fathers and mothers strangled their children or buried them
immediately after birth, for it was infamous to have them, and their
existence in an Arioi family would have created as much consternation
as in a Tibetan nunnery.
Infanticide in Tahiti and the surrounding islands was not confined
to the Arioi. The first three children of all couples were usually
destroyed, and twins were both killed. In the largest families more
than two or three children were seldom spared, and as they were a
prolific race, their not nursing the sacrificed innocents made for
more frequent births. Four, six, or even ten children would be killed
by one couple during their married life. Ellis, an English missionary,
says that not fewer than two-thirds of all born were destroyed. This
was the ordinary habit of the Tahitians. The Arioi spared not one.
Ellis wrote ninety years ago. He helped to disrupt the society. The
confessions of scores of its former members were poured into his
burning ears. In his unique book of his life in Tahiti, he described
their dramas, pantomimes, and dances, their religious rituals and
the extraordinary flights to which their merriment and ecstasy
went. Says Ellis:
These, though the general amusements of the Ariois, were not the only
purposes for which they were assembled. They included:
"All monstrous, all prodigious things."
And these were abominable, unutterable; in some of their meetings,
they appear to have placed invention on the rack to discover the worst
pollutions of which it was possible for man to be guilty, and to have
striven to outdo each other in the most revolting practices. The
mysteries of iniquity, and acts of more than bestial degradation,
to which they were at times addicted, must remain in the darkness in
which even they felt it sometimes expedient to conceal them. I will
not do violence to my sensibilities or offend those of my readers,
by details of conduct, which the mind cannot contemplate without
pollution and pain.
In these pastimes, in their accompanying abominations, and the
often-repeated practices of the most unrelenting, murderous cruelty,
these wandering Ariois passed their lives, esteemed by the people as
a superior order of beings, closely allied to the gods, and deriving
from them direct sanction, not only for their abominations, but even
for their heartless murders. Free from care or labor, they roved from
island to island, supported by the chiefs and priests; and were often
feasted with provisions plundered from the industrious husbandman,
whose gardens were spoiled by the hands of lawless violence, to provide
their entertainments, while his own family were not infrequently
deprived thereby for a time, of the means of subsistence. Such was
their life of luxurious and licentious indolence and crime.
Yet each Arioi had his own wife, also a member of the society. Improper
conduct toward an Arioi's wife by an Arioi was punished often by
death. To a woman such membership meant a singular freedom from the
tabus, prohibitions, that had forbidden her eating with men, tasting
pig, and other delicacies. She became the equal and companion of
these most interesting of her race, and talent in herself received
due honor. She sacrificed her children for a career, as is done to-day
less bloodily.
Believers in the immortality of the soul, the Arioi imagined a heaven
suited to their own wishes. They called it Rohutu noa-noa, or Fragrant
Paradise. In it all were in the first flush of virility, and enjoyed
the good things promised the faithful by Mohammed. The road to this
abode of houris and roasted pig was not to be trod in sackcloth or
in ashes, but in wreaths and with gaily colored bodies. To the sound
of drums and of flutes they were to dance and sing for the honor
of their merry god, Oro, and after a lifetime of joy and license,
of denial of nothing, unless it hurt their order, they were to die
to an eternity of celestial riot.
As old as the gods was the society of the Arioi, said the
Tahitians. Oro, the chief god, took a human wife, and descended on a
rainbow to her home. He spent his nights with her, and every morning
returned to the heavens. Two of his younger brothers searched for him,
and lacking wedding presents, one transformed himself into a pig and
a bunch of red feathers. The other presented these, and though they
remained with the wedded pair, the brother took back his own form. Oro,
to reward them, made them gods and Arioi. Ever after a pig and red
feathers were offerings to the idol of Oro by the Arioi. The brothers
formed the society and named the charter members of it in different
islands, and by these names those holding their offices were known
until they were abolished.
When called together by their chief, the members of the order made a
round of visits throughout the archipelago, in as many as seventy great
canoes, carrying with them their costumes and musical instruments
and their servants. They were usually welcomed enthusiastically
at their landing, and pigs, fruits, and kava prepared for their
delectation. They were gorgeous-looking performers in their pantomimes,
for besides tattooing, which marked their rank, they were decorated
with charcoal and the scarlet dye mati, and wore girdles of yellow
ti-leaves, or vests of ripe, golden plantain-leaves. Their heads were
wreathed in the yellow and red leaves of the hutu, and perhaps behind
an ear they wore a flower of brilliant hue.
They had seven ranks, like the chairs of a secret order in Europe or
in the United States nowadays. The first, the highest, was the Avae
parai, painted leg. The Arioi of this class was tattooed solidly
from the knees down. The second, Otiore, had both arms tattooed;
the third, Harotea, both sides of the body; the fourth, Hua, marked
shoulders; the fifth, Atoro, a small stripe on the left side; the
sixth, Ohemara, a small circle around each ankle, and the seventh,
Poo, were uninked. They were the neophytes, and had to do the heavy
work of the order, though servants, not members, termed fauaunau,
were part of the corps. These were sworn not to have any offspring.
The Arioi kept the records of the Tahitian nation. In their plays
they reënacted all the chief events in the history of the race, and
as there was no written account, these dramas were, with the legends
and stories they recited, the perpetuation of their archives and
chronicles. They were apt in travesty and satire. They ridiculed
the priests and current events, and by their wit made half the
people love them and half fear them. A manager directed all their
performances. They aimed at perfect rhythm in their chants and dances,
and grace and often sheer fun in their pantomimes. Some were wrestlers,
but boxing they left for others. As with the Marquesans to-day, they
had a fugleman, or leader, in all songs, who introduced the subject
in a prologue, and occasionally gave the cue to a change.
No man could reach high rank with them except by histrionic ability
and a strict compliance with their rules. Exceptions to the first
requirement might be found in the great chiefs. A candidate came before
the lodge in gala fashion, painted, wreathed, and laughing. Leaping
into their circle, he joined madly in the rout, and thus made known his
desire for admittance. If worthy, he became a servant, and only after
proving by a long novitiate his qualities was he given the lowest
rank. Then he received the name by which he would be known in the
society. He swore to kill his children, if he had any, and crooking
his left arm, he struck it with his right hand, and repeated the oath:
"The mountain above, the sacred mountain; the floor beneath Tamapua,
projecting point of the sea; Manunu, of majestic forehead; Teariitarai,
the splendor in the sky; I am of the mountain huruhuru." He spoke
his Arioi name, and snatched the covering of the chief woman present.
Occasionally there might be persons or districts that felt themselves
unwilling or too poor to entertain the Arioi. These had many devices
to overcome such obstacles. They would surround a child and pretend
to raise him to kingly rank, and then demand from his parents suitable
presents for such a distinction.
At death there were rites for the Arioi apart from those for
others. They paid the priest of Romotane, who kept the key of
their paradise, to admit the decedent to Rohutu noa-noa in the reva
or clouds above the mountain of Temehani unauna, in the island of
Raiatea. The ordinary people could seldom afford the fees demanded by
the priest, and had to be satisfied with a denial of this Mussulman
Eden reserved for the festive and devil-may-care Arioi, as ordinary
people perforce abstain from intoxicants in America while the rich
drink their fill. The historian Lecky says:
It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian Fathers that concupiscence,
or the sensual passion, was the "original sin" of human nature; and
it must be owned that the progress of knowledge, which is usually
extremely opposed to the ascetic theory of life, concurs with the
theological view, in showing the natural force of this appetite to
be far greater than the well-being of man requires. The writings of
Malthus have proved, what the Greek moralists appear in a considerable
degree to have seen, that its normal and temperate exercise would
produce, if universal, the utmost calamities to the world, and that,
while nature seems, in the most unequivocal manner, to urge the
human race to early marriages, the first condition of an advancing
civilization is to restrain or diminish them.
Conceive the state of Tahiti, where, as through all Polynesia,
the girls have their fling at promiscuity from puberty to the late
teens or early twenties, when an immense and increasing population
compelled the thinking men to devise a remedy for the starvation which
in times of drought or comparative failure of the feis or breadfruit
or a scarcity of fish menaced the nation! That the cruel remedy of
infanticide was chosen may be laid to ignorance of foeticidal methods,
and the indisposition of the languorous women to suffer pain or to
risk their own lives or health.
Lecky says that however much moralists may enforce the obligation
of extra-matrimonial purity, this obligation has never been even
approximately regarded. One could hardly expect from the heathen
Tahitians moral restraint. Malthus, a Christian clergyman, did not
until the second edition of his book add that to vice and misery as
checks of nature to an increase of humans faster than the means of
subsistence. Nor have most Christian or civilized nations made such
a check effectual.
The ever-dominant and only inherent impulse in all living beings,
including man, is the will to remain alive--the will, that is, to
attain power over those forces which make life difficult or impossible.
All schemes of morality are nothing more than efforts to put into
permanent codes the expedients found useful by some given race in
the course of its successful endeavors to remain alive.
Did not Zarathustra so philosophize, and is not the national trend
in Europe exalting his theory? With the difference that nationalism
takes the place of individualism in the scheme of survival and a
better place in the sun is the legend on the banners.
Unable to find enemies to keep their numbers down, exempt from the
epidemics and endemics of Europe and Asia, unacquainted with the
contraceptives known until recently only by our rich, but now preached
by organized societies to the humblest, the Tahitian, Marquesan,
and Hawaiian came to consider the blotting out of lives just begun
worthy deeds.
"The only good Indian is a dead Indian," was our own cynical Western
maxim when life and opportunity to lay by for the future meant
ceaseless struggle with the dispossessed.
We, in situations of dire necessity, eat our own fellows. We have done
it at sea and on land. We eat their flesh when shipwreck or isolation
urges survival. We let children die by the myriad for lack of proper
care and sustenance, and kill them in factories and tenements to
gain luxuries for ourselves. One justification for slavery was that
it gave leisure for culture to the slave-owners, and that Southern
chivalry and the charm of Southern womanhood outweighed the fettered
black bodies and souls in the scale of achievement.
The Tahitian did the best he could, and the Arioi set the example in
a total observance not to be demanded or expected of the mass. It is
related that if the child cried before destruction, it was spared,
for they had not the heart to kill it. If Arioi, the parents must
have given it away or otherwise avoided the opprobrium.
Another explanation of the bloody oath of the Arioi might be found
in an effort of the princes of Tahiti to prevent in this manner the
excessive growth of the Arii, or noble caste. The Arioi society
was founded by princes and led by them, but that they sought to
break down the power of the nobles is evidenced by their admitting
virtually all castes to it, thus making it a privileged democracy,
in which birthrights had not the sway they had outside it, but in
which the chap who could fight and dance, sing, and tell good stories
might climb from lowly position to honor and popularity, and in which
a clever woman could make her mark.
The early missionaries who had to combat the influence of the Arioi
may have exaggerated its baseness. In their unsophisticated minds,
unprepared by reading or experience for comparisons, most of them
sailing directly from English divinity schools or small bucolic
pastorates, the devout preachers thought Sabbatarianism of as much
consequence as morals, and vastly more important than health or
earthly happiness. They believed in diabolical possession, and were
prone to magnify the wickedness of the heathen, as one does hard
tasks. When Christianity had power in Tahiti, the bored natives were
sometimes scourged into church, and fines and imprisonment for lack of
devotion were imposed by the native courts. Often self-sacrificing,
the missionaries felt it was for the natives' eternal walfare, and
that souls might be saved even by compulsion. The Arioi society melted
under a changed control and Christian precepts.
Livingstone in the wilds of primeval Africa, making few converts,
but giving his life to noble effort, meditated often upon the success
of the missionaries in the South Seas--a success perhaps magnified
by the society which financed and cheered the restless men whom it
sent to Tahiti. Livingstone in his darker moments, consoling himself
with the accounts of these achievements in the missionary annals,
doubted his own efficacy against the deep depravity and heathenism of
his black flock. The fact unknown to him was that the missionaries in
Polynesia preached and prayed, doctored and taught, ten years before
they made a single convert. It was not until they bagged the king
that a pawn was taken by the whites from the adversaries' stubborn
game. The genius of these strugglers against an apparent impregnable
seat of wickedness was patience, "the passion of great hearts."
But conquering once politically, the missionaries found their task all
but too easy to suit militant Christians. As the converted drunkard
and burglar at a slum pentecost pour out their stories of weakness and
crime, so these Arioi, glorying in their being washed white as snow,
recited to hymning congregations confessions that made the offenses
of the Marquis de Sade or Jack the Ripper fade into peccadilloes.
Christian says:
Their Hevas or dramatic entertainments, pageants and tableaus,
of varying degrees of grossness, similar to the more elaborate and
polished products of the early Javanese and Peruvian drama ... one
cannot help fancying must be all pieces out of the same puzzle ... I
have with some pains discovered the origin of the name "Arioi." It
throws a lurid light on the character of some of the Asiatic explorers
who must have visited this part of the Eastern Pacific prior to the
Europeans. In Maori the word Karioi means debauched, profligate,
good-for-nothing. In Raratonga [an island near Tahiti] the adjective
appears as Kariei. These are probably slightly worn down forms of
the Persian Khara-bati, which has precisely the same significance
as the foregoing. One is forced to the conclusion that the Arabian
Nights stories of the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor were founded
on a bed-rock of solid fact, and that Persian and Arab merchants,
pirates and slave-traders, must have penetrated into these far-off
waters, and brought their vile, effeminate luxury and shameful customs
with them from Asia, of which transplanted iniquity, the parent soil
half-forgotten, this word, like several others connected with revelry
and vice, like a text in scarlet lettering, survives to this day.
The first Jesuit missionaries to the Caroline Islands found there
an organization with privileges and somewhat the same objects as the
Arioi, which was called Uritoi. As "t" is a letter often omitted or
altered in these island tongues, it is not hard by leaving it out to
find a likeness in the names Arioi and Urioi. The Carolines and Tahiti
are thousands of miles apart, and not inhabited by the same race.
Ellis was a missionary incapable by education, experience, and
temperament of appreciation of the artistic life of the Arioi. He
would have chased the faun into seclusion until he could clothe him
in English trousers, and would have rendered the Venus of Milo into
bits. Despite an honest love for mankind and considerable discernment,
he saw nothing in the Arioi but a logical and diabolical condition of
paganism. Artistry he did not rank high, nor, to find a reason for the
Arioi, did he go back of Satan's ceaseless seeking whom he may devour.
Bovis, a Frenchman, world traveled, having seen perhaps the frescos
of Pompeii, and familiar with the histories of old Egypt, India,
Greece, Persia, and Rome, knew that Sodom and Gomorrah had their
replicas in all times, and that often such conduct as that of the
Arioi was associated among ancient or primitive peoples with artistic
and interesting manifestations.
He searched the memories of the old men and women for other things
than abominations, and gave the Arioi a good name for possession of
many excellent qualities and for a rare development of histrionic
ability. But more than being mere mimes and dancers, the Arioi were
the warriors, the knights of that day and place, the men-at-arms,
the chosen companions of the king and chiefs, and in general the
bravest and most cultivated of the Tahitians. They were an extended
round-table for pleasure in peace and for counsel and deeds of
derring-do in war. The society was a nursery of chivalry, a company
which recruited, but did not reproduce themselves. They had a solid
basis, and lasted long because the society kept out of politics.
The members never forgot the duty due their chiefs. They accompanied
them in their enterprises, and they killed their fellow-members in the
enemy's camp, as Masons fought Masons in the American Civil War and
in the wars of Europe. In peace they were epicures. They consorted
together only for pleasure and comfort in their reunions. The Arioi
made their order no stepping-stone to power or office, but in it swam
in sensuous luxury, each giving his talents to please his fellows
and to add luster to his society.
To the English missionaries who converted the Tahitians to the
Christian faith the Arioi adherent was the chief barrier, the fiercest
opponent, and, when won over, the most enthusiastic neophyte. In
that is found the secret of the society's strength. It embraced
all the imaginative, active, ambitious Tahitians, to whom it gave
opportunities to display varied talents, to form close friendships,
to rise in rank, to meet on evener terms those more aristocratic in
degree, and, above all, to change the monotony of their existence by
eating, drinking, and being merry in company, and all at the expense
of the other fellow. But--and the more you study the Polynesian,
the subtler are his strange laws and taboos--the main provision in
the Arioi constitution was undoubtedly conceived in the desire to
prevent over-population.
Pepe, the woman of Tuatini, had returned to the ways of the Arioi
because her husband had adopted the white convention of jealousy and
monogamy. Only Tahitians like Tetuanui now knew anything about the
order, and so many generations had they been taught shame of it that
the very name was unspoken, as that of the mistletoe god was among
the Druids after St. Patrick had accomplished his mission in Ireland.