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 fashion, 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 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.

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 passion, 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 appetite 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 puberty 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.