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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.
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.
The early missionaries who had to combat the influence of the Arioi may have exaggerated its baseness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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 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.
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