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Updated: June 17, 2025
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."
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.
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.
"The Arioi have been in Tahiti as long as the Tahitians," said the old men to the first whites.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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