3. The ariki is the king who is close by, not the king in the sky (Sun) and not the king in the dark underworld (Saturn). In the calendar of the week we find 'the king' in Thursday and there he is Jupiter, the god of thunder and lightning. Jupiter means 'father light', i.e. he reflects the 'light' (orders) given by the higher powers (the stars and Saturn).

'... Based upon the fact that toko in New Zealand also means 'rays of light', it has been suggested that the original props which separated and held apart Sky and Earth were conceived of as shafts of dawn sunlight. 

In most Polynesian languages the human and animate classifier is toko-, suggesting a congruence of semantic and symbolic meaning between anthropomorphic form and pole or post. Tane as First Man and the embodiment of sunlight thus becomes, in the form of a carved human male figure, the probable inspiration for the moai as sacred prop between Sky and Earth.

The moai as Sky Propper would have elevated Sky and held it separate from Earth, balancing it only upon his sacred head. This action allowed the light to enter the world and made the land fertile.

Increasing the height of the statues, as the Rapa Nui clearly did over time, would symbolically increase the space between Sky and Earth, ensuring increased fertility and the greater production of food. The proliferating image, consciously or unconsciously, must have visually (and reassuringly) filled the dangerously empty horizon between sea and land, just as the trees they were so inexorably felling once had.' (Van Tilburg)

To this I would like to add that these moai statues ('living images of the past') are individualized, they are not stereotypes. Each one of them presumably represents an ariki (though not necessarily the chief king, ariki mau). Several tribes warred which each other in later centuries and each certainly must have had some kind of a king of their own. Nearly every moai statue had their back to the sea and were overlooking a piece of land.