ir 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,