Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 33

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 ama.s.sed, and food must be procured by some labor, either of the chase, fis.h.i.+ng, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 n.o.bles 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 wors.h.i.+pers 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 const.i.tutes 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 divertis.e.m.e.nt, 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 wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds, 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 inst.i.tution was of great age, without written chronicles, and, like all Polynesian history, obscured by the superst.i.tions 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 members.h.i.+p--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 amus.e.m.e.nts of the Ariois, were not the only purposes for which they were a.s.sembled. 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 pa.s.sed their lives, esteemed by the people as a superior order of beings, closely allied to the G.o.ds, 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 members.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds was the society of the Arioi, said the Tahitians. Oro, the chief G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds 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 cla.s.s 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 reenacted 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sion, 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 appet.i.te 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 p.u.b.erty 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 s.h.i.+pwreck 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 ma.s.s. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 n.o.ble caste. The Arioi society was founded by princes and led by them, but that they sought to break down the power of the n.o.bles 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 p.r.o.ne 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 n.o.ble 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 p.a.w.n 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociated 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 l.u.s.ter 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 friends.h.i.+ps, 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 const.i.tution 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 G.o.d was among the Druids after St. Patrick had accomplished his mission in Ireland.