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Updated: June 17, 2025
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 Manahune could not rise above his caste except by the rare nomination of the king, but they could become Teuteu Arii, or servants of an Arii, and might thus acquire immense importance. "Like the eunuchs at courts or the mistresses of the noble and rich," I remarked. The chief shrugged his shoulders. "The Manahune might become a priest or even join the society of the Arioi," he rejoined.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their national ballads, the achievements of the warrior, the fisherman, the woodsman, the canoe-builder, and the artist, had been orally recorded and impressed in this manner in the conclaves of the Arioi.
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.
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.
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