When Europeans undertook their campaigns of conquest and exploration in what seemed to them “new” worlds, they found the natives engaged in many strange and lurid activities. Cannibalism was reported, though seldom convincingly documented, along with human sacrifice, bodily mutilation, body and face painting, and flagrantly open sexual practices. Equally jarring to European sensibilities was the almost ubiquitous practice of ecstatic ritual, in which the natives would gather to dance, sing, or chant to a state of exhaustion and, beyond that, sometimes trance. Everywhere they went — among the hunter-gatherers of Australia, the horticulturists of Polynesia, the village peoples of India — white men and occasionally women witnessed these electrifying rites so frequently that there seemed to them to be, among “the present societies of savage men . . . an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology.” The European idea of the “savage” came to focus on the image of painted and bizarrely costumed bodies, drumming and dancing with wild abandon by the light of a fire.
What did they actually see? A single ritual could look very different to different observers. When he arrived in Tahiti in the late 1700s, Captain Cook watched groups of girls performing “a very indecent dance which they call Timorodee, singing the most indecent songs and using most indecent actions . . . In doing this they keep time to a great nicety.” About sixty years later, Herman Melville found the same ritual, by then called “Lory-Lory” and perhaps modified in other ways, full of sensual charm.