While Oom the Omnipotent, Pierre Bernard, is nowadays credited with introducing yoga practices to America’s elites, his numerous other accomplishments included founding a tantra commune, managing a baseball team, and serving as a bank president. He was a yogi, a hypnotist, an occultist, a scholar, and a lecturer. He also dabbled in dog racing. Indeed, there was a time when Oom the Omnipotent exerted a mesmerizing influence over some of the flakiest of America’s upper crust. However, it wasn’t always so. Becoming omnipotent requires a great deal of trial and error, mostly error in Bernard’s case. Not to mention that in one’s quest for omnipotence, one is bound to run afoul of local law enforcement authorities who are often reluctant to accommodate a man on his quest for omnipotence. For certain, in Bernard’s case chasing omnipotence was mostly accompanied by scandal, run-ins with the law, charges of fraud and unshakeable impotence.
Oom was born Perry Arnold Baker to Erastus W. Baker and Kittie C. (Givens) Baker in Leon, Iowa in 1875. The couple soon divorced, however, and Kittie remarried to John C. Bernard, with young Perry taking on the surname of his stepfather. After Perry was sent to Lincoln, Nebraska to live with a cousin, he met Sylvais Hamati and became Hamati’s pupil. The pair eventually landed in San Francisco in 1893. Billed as Hamati’s pupil, Bernard taught hypnotism and promoted its use to treat psychological maladies.
In May of 1897, Perry A. Baker partnered with Dr. H. M. Thornton in a venture called the Pacific Hypnotic Institute at 44 Sixth street in San Francisco. Scandal erupted when the parents of young Edward Kline complained to police that their son “has stayed away from home and been entirely under the influence of the disciples of Mesmer.” Despite the parents’ repeated efforts to see their son, Baker and Thornton denied knowledge of Kline’s whereabouts. However, during an interview with an officer McMurray, Perry Baker’s powers of omnipotence began to kick in and he spilled the beans on the recent activities of the young Kline.
“He said the boy is an excellent subject and when under hypnotic influence is a great clairvoyant. He sees wonderful things. The lad is particularly valuable as a subject for students of hypnotism, Baker’s pupils, to practice their newly developing powers upon. He yields readily to their influence. In fact, of all his subjects, Baker said, Kline was the favorite. Baker said that he pays Kline $5 a week, and gives him his board and lodging for his services, and added that the boy is worth three times as much,” the San Francisco Call and Post reported.
During a court hearing convened to determine if Edward Kline was a vagrant, Perry Baker testified that his powers of hypnotism saved the boy’s life. According to Baker, the boy’s parents objected to his desire to marry a young girl for whom he had tender feelings. This caused Kline to become suicidal. “Perry explained that young Kline was saved from death by carbolic acid poisoning by hypnotic powers that were thrown upon him,” said the Call and Post. Of course, this was all news to his mother who knew nothing of her son’s designs to marry.
But the tale became a great deal stranger when Edward Kline himself made revelations to the court so astonishing that they caused Judge Campbell to comb his whiskers vigorously with his fingers in anxious disbelief.
According to Kline, there was a club of lawyers and businessmen who met weekly on the fifth floor of the Parrot building on Monday evenings. “The lawyers, so the lad stated, would throw him into a trance to make use of his clairvoyant powers. They would send his mind to read the minds of their clients in order to secure more facts as to cases in hand. They would also get him to go out on similar occult expeditions to probe the minds of opposing counsel in order to get ‘tips’ as to what their next moves would be.
“Others, the boy stated, were in search of information as to mining stocks and the probability of certain horses winning at the races.
“From what he could learn from these seekers for inside facts the lad said he believed he gave them pretty straight ‘pointers.’”
The boy went on to testify that “he feels sure that those for whom he has been a subject will come to his rescue and try to prove that he is not a vagrant and that his mental submission to their wills is not in any way an injury to him,” the Call and Post read.
Ultimately, Judge Campbell decided there was no evidence to support the charge of vagrancy and terminated the inquiry. He then made a rather unorthodox ruling, ordering the boy be hypnotized to “make him think he has a desire to stay with his mother, and then to send him home.”
Apparently, Judge Campbell’s solution worked because the boy returned home “and declared his intention to remain at home with his mother.” Additionally, in a follow-up call to the Call editorial room, Baker and Thornton took full credit for young Kline’s change of heart. “‘You remember,’ said Thornton, ‘that Kline said in court he would rather go to the reform school than go home. Now he says that he is glad to be home, and that he intends to stay there. That is because of the hypnotic suggestion I gave him. The suggestion will influence him as long as I choose.’”
Free from the sinister influence of the Pacific Hypnotic Institute, Edward Kline’s mind slowly began to emerge from captivity. As the San Francisco Examiner reported a few days later, “Young Kline refers now to the hypnotists as fakirs and declares that they used belladonna and chloroform on subjects and students. He has not yet recovered from the effects of his stay in the studio. His nerves are much unstrung. His mother says that his actions at times are very peculiar. Young Kline has many marks on his body to show where he was struck, and where pins were stuck into his flesh while he was in either a condition of hypnotism or under the influence of chloroform.”
While it is not known how the lawyers and businessmen of the Parrot building fared after their clairvoyant was returned to his family, there can be no doubt that Perry A. Baker aka Perry Bernard aka Pierre Bernard learned a valuable lesson. Whatever hypnotic powers or occult wisdom Bernard may or may not have possessed, he certainly grew in his knowledge and ability to exert influence over others and brainwash the unsuspecting, a skill that would serve him well and he would repeatedly employ in his quest to become Oom the Omnipotent.
Sources:
Census records
The Leon Journal-Reporter
The San Francisco Call and Post
The San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Examiner
The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love (2010)
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