"Fijians often complain that their ruling chief is a kai tani, a 'different person' or 'stranger' in the land; or else, he is a vulagi, a 'guest', a term that Hocart also analyzes as 'heavenly god'. 'The chiefs... came from overseas', Hocart was told by a Lauan, 'it is so in all countries of Fiji'...

Here, in a very condensed form, is a typical Fijian myth of the origin of the current ruling clan (mataqali):

A handsome, fair-skinned stranger, victim of an accident at sea, is befriended by a shark who carries him ashore on the south coast of Viti Levu. The stranger wanders into the interior where he is taken in by a local chieftain, whose daughter he eventually marries. From this union springs the line of Noikoro ruling chiefs, the narrator of the story being the tenth descendant on that line. He and his clansmen are called 'The Sharks' (Na Qio)...

It is all as in the Hawaiian proverb: 'A chief is a shark that travels on land'...

Luc de Heusch quotes Saint Just to the effect that 'between the people and the king there can be no natural relation.' Yet the idea was not entirely revolutionary. Many peoples had long before concluded that power is not inherent in humanity. It can only come from elsewhere than the community and relationships of humankind. In this classic sense, power is a barbarian.

It is typically founded on an act of barbarism - murder, incest, or both. Heusch calls this 'the exploit', a feat mythically associated with the ancestor of the dynasty, and frequently reenacted at the installation of each successor... "

"Power reveals and defines itself as the rupture of the people's own moral order, precisely as the greatest of crimes against kinship: fraticide, parricide, the union of mother and son, father and daughter, or brother and sister."

"It is more important to notice that power is not represented here as an intrinsic social condition. It is usurpation, in the double sense of a forceful seizure of sovereignity and a sovereign denial of the prevailing moral order.

Rather than a normal succession, usurpation itself is the principle of legitimacy. Hocart shows that the coronation rituals of the king or paramount chief celebrate a victory over his predecessor. If he has not actually sacrificed the late ruler, the heir to the Hawaiian kingship, or some one of his henchmen, is suspected of having poisoned him.

There follows the scene of ritual chaos... when the world dissolves or is in significant respects inverted, until the new king returns to reinstate the tabus, i.e., the social order. Such mythical exploits and social disruptions are common to the beginnings of dynasties and to successive investitures of divine kings.

We can summarily interpret the significance something like this: to be able to put the society in order, the king must first reproduce an original disorder. Having committed the monstrous acts against society, proving he is stronger than it, the ruler proceeds to bring system out of chaos.

Recapitulating the initial constitution of social life, the accession of the king is thus a recreation of the universe. The king makes his advent as a god. The symbolism of the installation rituals is cosmological."

"The rationalization of power is not at issue so much as the representation of a general scheme of social life: a total 'structure of reproduction', including the complementary and antithetical relations between king and people, god and man, male and female, foreign and native, war and peace, heavens and earth."

(Islands of History)