“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.”