AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The show ran nightly and left no script
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Claim (verbatim)
The ʻarioi were the professional performance society of the Society Islands — ranked, tattooed, travelling companies whose satirical dramas, dances and recitations the earliest European residents watched night after night: the Bounty mutineer James Morrison, living in Tahiti after the mutiny, described the repertoire and privileges in his Journal, and the trader-consul Moerenhout could still describe the institution at length in 1837. Between those witnesses the mission arrived, and the society — whose infanticide obligations and license made it, to mission eyes, the exact centre of heathenism — dissolved in the conversion decade after 1815; its repertoire was precisely the part of Tahitian orature no missionary would transcribe. The one man positioned to save the rest, the LMS missionary John Muggridge Orsmond, collected Tahitian texts from 1817 to his death in 1856 — and his completed manuscript, delivered to the French administration in 1848, was lost in Paris; what his granddaughter Teuira Henry could rebuild from his surviving papers became Ancient Tahiti (Bishop Museum Bulletin 48, 1928). A double filter — suppression at the source, loss of the one compilation — should leave a corpus inverted from performance frequency: the esoteric creation liturgies Orsmond took from former priests survive at length, while the society's nightly staple survives as descriptions without scripts. Prediction: a genre census of the Tahitian-language texts in Ancient Tahiti will find texted specimens of ʻarioi performance repertoire — the satirical dramas and entertainment pieces Morrison and Moerenhout attest as the society's staple — amounting to less than one tenth of the cosmogonic and liturgical corpus by line count, with the ʻarioi material carrying rank formulas and ritual fragments but not one complete dramatic text (primary clause: the under-one-tenth line-count ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill: Teuira Henry, Ancient Tahiti (Bishop Museum Bulletin 48, 1928), tabulated by genre and line count against the performance inventories in The Journal of James Morrison (ed. Rutter, 1935) and Moerenhout, Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan (1837).
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: a genre census of the Tahitian-language texts in Ancient Tahiti will find texted specimens of ʻarioi performance repertoire — the satirical dramas and entertainment pieces Morrison and Moerenhout attest as the society's staple — amounting to less than one tenth of the cosmogonic and liturgical corpus by line count, with the ʻarioi material carrying rank formulas and ritual fragments but not one complete dramatic text (primary clause: the under-one-tenth line-count ratio; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: Teuira Henry, Ancient Tahiti (Bishop Museum Bulletin 48, 1928), tabulated by genre and line count against the performance inventories in The Journal of James Morrison (ed. Rutter, 1935) and Moerenhout, Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan (1837).
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, Oceania wave 2: knowledge carried in chant, notation, skin, sand, court testimony and object rather than script alone, every item anchored in real objects, corpora, voyage and mission records, court archives and published testimonia with datable loss mechanisms (the 1862-63 raids, the 1819 ʻAi Noa, the 1835 Rēkohu invasion, the 1848 Orsmond manuscript loss); five candidates dropped in disjointness and honesty checks — Lapita motif attrition (overlaps registered cj-099-lapita-entropy), Jaussen-list reading protocol, stick-chart typology-provenance and Kumulipo internal analysis (wave-1 ground), and Kiribati maneaba traditions (no kill of adequate strength); disjoint from breadth-oceania wave 1.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
That the ʻarioi survive as description (Morrison's Journal; Moerenhout, 1837) rather than as script, and that Ancient Tahiti is dominated by the cosmogonic and priestly liturgies Orsmond took from former priests, is standard Tahitian scholarship — Douglas Oliver's Ancient Tahitian Society (1974) works exactly this asymmetry, and the loss of Orsmond's 1848 compilation in Paris is a documented event. It is also effectively known that no complete ʻarioi dramatic text was ever transcribed. But the primary clause is a line-count census — texted ʻarioi repertoire under one-tenth of the cosmogonic/liturgical corpus in Ancient Tahiti — and that genre-by-line-count tabulation was not located as ever having been computed. Adjacent.
- Teuira Henry, Ancient Tahiti (Bishop Museum Bulletin 48, 1928)
- Douglas L. Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society (University Press of Hawaii, 1974)
Predictions
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