Tag: hypnotism

Before Oom became omnipotent: A needle pulling thread

Following the negative publicity surrounding the Edward Kline incident, Perry A. Baker decided a name change was in order.  Adopting the last name of his step-father, John Bernard, Baker next made headlines in January of 1898 when he conducted a demonstration of self-induced hypnosis as Professor P. A. Bernard of the San Francisco College of Suggestive Therapeutics.  Dr. Semple Turman of the college presided over the demonstration, while a Dr. D. M. McMillan assisted Bernard.  There were ten physicians and a number of reporters present to witness Bernard’s powers of mesmerism.  None of the newspapers appeared to make the connection that this was the same hypnotist who only six months earlier had used his hypnotic abilities to hold a local couple’s son captive and exploit him for financial benefit.  Instead articles painted him as a recent arrival in San Francisco from Des Moines, Iowa. 

Dressed in a flowing white robe, the white-haired Dr. Turman positioned the newspaper photographers present at the exhibition and requested soothing music from the college’s resident piano player.  “Soft music, you know, is of great assistance in putting the professor to sleep.”  The college was housed in the woman’s home at 911 Van Ness ave.  As Professor Bernard sat quietly in an easy chair, the pianist tapped out a gentle melody on the vintage piano.  Soon the mood was set and the great and powerful Oom rose to address those assembled, embarking on the next step of his journey to omnipotence.

“I’m doing this purely for the benefit of science and I want the M.D.’s present to pay strict attention.  Of course, I ain’t doing nothing for my health, and I want to tell you right here that my classes will be opened right away.  This is business with me, and I don’t want any of you people to think that you are going to get something for nothing.  But this exhibition tonight is for the benefit of science and the M.D.’s here.  I’m going to let you do anything you want to me within reason.  You can sew me up in any style you’ve a mind to, but you can’t cut off an arm or a leg, or do any monkey business like that.  We ain’t here for monkey business nohow.  I’m here to give you the straight thing.  I’m telling you that any physician can learn how to do suggestive hypnotism if he wants to, and I’m in this town to teach it to those who want to learn it.  I will now, with your kind permission, go to sleep.”

As tranquil music flowed from the piano, Professor Bernard, again seated in his easy chair, composed himself and momentarily drifted off to sleep.  Next, Dr. McMillan invited the physicians to examine Bernard.  One by one, they poked and thumped the subject, took his pulse and peeked under his eyelids.  While there was no response forthcoming from the sleeping Bernard, the doctors remarked that he did not show signs of being under anesthesia.  Then McMillan took out a needle and thread of the variety used in surgeries.  He dipped the needle in alcohol, passed it through Bernard’s right cheek and proceeded to sew Bernard’s ear to his cheek.  Next, McMillan sewed the professor’s upper lip to his nose, and as a grand finale, ran a hat pin through the professor’s tongue.  Alas, a slick yoga move of sewing the professor’s ass to his face was, in this instance, overlooked.  Once the thread and the hat pin had been removed, McMillan revived the professor.  Despite the towel placed around Bernard’s neck being soaked in blood, the professor declared that he felt no pain.  As Bernard’s face slowly reverted back to its original form, he then demonstrated how to produce sleep in a subject using his techniques of scientific hypnotism.  

Bernard’s demonstration garnered national attention and stirred some debate among medical doctors regarding the usefulness of hypnosis as an alternative to anesthesia.  However, most physicians agreed Bernard’s techniques were of little value to medical science, and it appears the San Francisco College of Suggestive Therapeutics experienced little demand for Bernard’s course on suggestive hypnotism.  But the Great Oom was in no way discouraged and in very short order was, once again, embroiled in scandal. 

Sources:

Census records

The Chicago Tribune 

The Leon Journal-Reporter

The San Francisco Call and Post

The San Francisco Examiner

Before Oom became omnipotent: The clairvoyant vagrant

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)