The great Oom

THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS YOGA IN AMERICA HAD A TASTE FOR MONEY, CONTROL AND IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG WOMEN

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I was January 26, 1898, live days into San Fran­cisco's party of the century. The city had been buffed to i glow for its golden jubilee, he 50th anniversary of the discovery of gold in Califor­nia. The streets were awash

in gold bunting; the city's parks were illuminated by strings of electric lights and Chinese lanterns. In the drunken shivaree that went on around the clock, frequent booms and blasts shattered the air—from naval cannons and 21-gun salutes to elaborate fire­works that contributed to the wildest week San Francisco had ever known.

But on this cool winter evening a more dignified assembly had gathered at a quiet location a few blocks away from the festivities. The San Francisco College of Suggestive Therapeutics had invited some 40 doctors and oth­ers to witness a groundbreaking dem­onstration. As gentlemen of science, the guests were dressed formally for the occasion in wing collars and frock coats, and they hushed themselves as they turned their attention to the thin young man seated before them.

Professor Pierre Arnold Bernard was 22 years old and looked it: Sandy-haired and pink-skinned, he could nearly be described as boyish, save for a lush reddish mustache and intense gray blue eyes that defied his elders to doubt him. He informed the gallery that, they were about to see a rare simulation of death by men­tal power, a self-imposed anesthetic trance that he, Professor Bernard, called the Kali Mudra in honor of the fierce Hindu goddess. Two reporters took down his words and witnessed the feat as it unfolded. A sketch art­ist and a photographer, authorized to make "flashlight portraits" of the proceedings in the darkened room, worked quietly.

"Ready," said the subject. He closed his eyes as an elderly man named Dr. I). McMillan prepared the surgical tools. Dr. McMillan knew it would take three minutes before hi' could begin. His subject had even now fled the realm of sensation and was drawing his thoughts inward, following the path laid out. for him years before by his Indian guru Sylvais Ilamati, who was there that night only in spirit. Bernard lengthened his respiration, slowed it, stretched it, thinned it to a near noth­ing. His chest gradually stopped mov­ing, and he slid his eyes up beneath the lids. lie burrowed his consciousness down, down, down—deep inside the muck and thud of his pulsing blood and organs—and shrank it to a pin­point less than the size of a cell before he pushed it out. through tliis portal

into a vast undulating etherlike peace the yogis call samadhi. He was gone.

McMillan and Dr. Semple Turman of tiie college turned to the onlook­ers, who watched with intense curios­ity. Bernard now appeared to be as still as a corpse. McMillan then bran­dished for the galleiy a steel surgical needle nearly a foot in length. lie approached his subject and pushed the needle slowly through Bernard's

earlobe. The doctors watched as he pushed another needle through the young man's cheek. He inserted a third through Bernard's upper lip and then ran a fourth through his nostril, sewing the ends of the metal togeth­er witJi thread. A bit of blood began to run into the swaddling wrapped around the subject's neck.

The surgeiy continued, but there was no movement from the patient, whose rosy features had turned wliite. His hands were cold and clammy to

McMillan's touch. Tho surgeons finished thoir work and stepped back. Tho assoni-blod group was invited to come close for

a better look, but "Wait," they wore

told. Tliis was not yol the culmination of the demonstration. McMillan gently opened Bernard's mouth. In one hand he biandishod a largo ladios' hat pin and ran it slowly through the center of Ber­nard's tongue, wliich no doubt caused a few in the room to wince but produced not even a flutter of reaction from the tongue's owner. The assembled doc­tors were beckoned to come close once again to inspect the man in the trance, and they did.

The doubters among them were convinced by (heir own eyes. Iliis was not a carnival sideshow or a magician's trick. The young American yogi had successfully put himself in a trance state deep enough to induce anesthe­sia to the degree that he slept when an instrument cut. through his tongue like a fork through a beefsteak. McMillan snipped the threads and removed the needles and pins from Bernard's flesh; the towel around his neck had turned dark with his blood. Though Bernard appeared to be somewhat dazed when he came to, he quickly regained him­self and assured the crowd he was per­fectly fine. In fact, he felt well enough to stand up and demonstrate his own powers of suggestion on a professional subject named E. Mansfield Williams, whose head dropped into a trance without Bernard employing any of the objects and hocus-pocus of a perform­ing hypnotist.

Bernard, the reporter noted with awe, did it "telepathically." Most im­portant, Bernard's techniques could be passed along to anyone who wished to enroll at the College of Suggestive Therapeutics and learn the secrets of what he called "trained occultism."

Pierre Arnold Bernard was the first American yogi and a spiritual hero to members of the Lost Generation. He endured—as a man, a teacher and a philosopher—for more than half a century. Due to his efforts and energy, yoga morphed from an ascetic practice to the healthy, vital activity we know to­day. He was a general in the campaign to defend yoga, and he lived to see it become tolerated, then accepted and finally praised.

While Bernard may have been one of the more celebrated Americans of the 1920s and 1930s, early in the century he bore the burden of notoriety as the Omnipotent Oom, Loving Guru of the Tantriks, the very model of the licen­tious, greedy Svengali. In those days he was labeled a big-city charlatan, a fraud, a seducer of (continued on page 127)

OOM

(amtinued Jrom page 64) young girls, a spiritual con artist. lie was accused of orchestrating sexual orgies, per­forming abortions, hypnotizing wealthy fe­male benefactors (and beautiful poor ones, too) and fleecing veterans of their savings. Some of these accusations were utterly false, others not far from the irulh.

By 1904 Bernard was engaged in the grand work of his life: to spread the knowledge of yoga in his native land, organizing devo­tees and initiates into an ambitious national network of lodges. lie traveled to St. Louis, Chicago and New York City, where he estab­lished a fledgling publishing firm called the Tantrik Press. During his New York jour­neys he cultivated writers and editors for the press and had begun to personally min­ister to Broadway actresses, a practice that would become a mainstay of his business in the years to come.

Bernard labored to build his Tantrik Order into an influential secret society akin to the Freemasons, of which he himself was a rising member. If the TO seems exotic by today's social standards, it was not far from the mainstream of American life at the time. Every night in American cities large and small, bewhiskered fraternal brothers and their sisters in veils and gloves scur­ried across the cobblestones from meeting

to meeting, carrying rule books, manuals, pins, badges and feathers. During the first decade of the century, membership in all such societies ran in the millions, so most Americans were familiar with—and even drawn to—the ideas of inner and outer circles, passwords, tests of allegiance and degrees of initiation.

In his use of symbols, codes and rituals, Bernard borrowed liberally from the Free­masons, the Theosophists and other groups, religious as well as secular. Beneath the pomp and plumes, however, he detected a genuine hunger for mystical experience—a direct connection to the divine—that many Americans failed to find at church. This was a time of great spiritual upheaval in the nation, what has been called alternately the Third Great Awakening or the first New Age, depending on your point of view.

Bernard's system was an American adap­tation of Hindu Tantrisin, a mix of religious rituals, beliefs and practices based on sacred scriptures called tantras that teach follow­ers the material world is an expression of the divine. Linking the many diverse sects of Tantrism is the worsliip of the feminine power of procreation, and Hindu tantric ritual revolves around the worship of the goddess Shakti (sometimes spelled Sakti), the female principle of regeneration. From this platform the tantric masters later arrived at the idea of the human body as potentially pure and godlike, and in India's 10th century Tantrism gave birth to hatha

yoga, the science of postures and breathing that Bernard taught and that is familiar to 21st century Americans. In Bernard's time Tantrism had been suppressed for centuries in its mother count 17, functioning as a kind of underground in the Westernized Hindu society imposed on India by British rulers and Western missionaries.

Tantrikas divide themselves along two very different paths. The right-hand path takes a conservative approach, interpreting the tantric texts symbolically. A right-hand Tantrist, for example, could pursue the wor­ship of Shakti through reverence for his wife and without violating the bonds of his marriage. Those taking the left-hand path, however, are willing to flout society's norms and revel in mixing the sacred and the so-called profane. This path uses tabs— drugs, alcohol and extramarital sex—and engages in the ritual known in India as the five Ms, which refer to the Sanskrit words for wine, meat, fish, parched grain (perhaps a psychotropic substance or drug) and sex­ual intercourse.

The first four are used to rouse the sexual instinct, which is then channeled to rouse the serpent power, the kundalini, granting the adept great powers and knowledge. In the ascetic traditions of Indian religion, all of the five Ms are forbidden fruit, so a left-handed tantric ritual could be a shameful, heart-pounding excursion into outlaw behavior.

The ritual of sacramental sexual inter­course has forever captured the human

imagination. Often a high priest choreo­graphs two young initiates as they perform the act in the midst of a solemn circle of chanting devotees. The ritual harkens back to Ice Age female fertility worship and the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks, and it has found its way into the plot of the mod­ern best-seller The Da Vinci Code.

Bernard's group rescued secret rooms for such worship in several cities, according to witnesses, and he gave many hints that sex as a sacrament was part of the tantric prac­tices he taught. In San Francisco, Bernard and the young Tantrikas were at least dab­bling with the hard-core left-handed stuff. The evidence for this lies in the group's clas­sified newspaper ad beckoning members to a Kaula ceremony, generally considered one of the most extreme forms oft ant ra. In Kaula rites, the sexual act is performed in a chakra circle of worshippers, always late at night in a deserted place in order to maintain the pri­vacy necessary to perform the five Ms.

And just so there was no confusion about who was licensed to be at the center of the sacred sex, Bernard quoted to his follow­ers from a translation of the Mahanirvana Tantra, which notes only a worshipper who possesses a seventh-degree certification in the Tantrik Order—in this case Bernard himself—"may marry by mutual choice another, in the assemblage of the Shakti worshipers, when a circle is formed." Ber­nard could choose his own partner for sacred sex, or he could act as a matchmaker for willing initiates.

Much of what we know about Bernard's thinking is contained in a remarkable book-length document called Vim Sadhana: the International Journal oj the Tantrik Order

(American edition). In the debut publica­tion of the Tantrik Press, the book makes the case for tantric yoga, as Bernard sometimes called his practice, proclaiming it to be the most scientific and up-to-date way to wor­ship and live. In an essay called "The Basis of Religion," he calls for a more elevated discussion of love and sex.

This erotic manifesto, which Bernard left unsigned for legal protection, was writ­ten with the kind of linguistic assurance displayed in his lectures. "The animat­ing impulse of all organic life is the sexual instinct," he writes. "It is that which under­lies the struggle for existence in the animal world and is the source of all human endeavor and emotion." Sex, Bernard goes on to attest, "is the most powerful factor in all that pertains to the human race and has ever been the cause and the subject of man's most exalted thought."

To the Tantrikas, discussion of the sex instinct was not merely theoretical. The suc­cess of the club relied on initiates like Florin Jones and Winlield Nidiolls, who drummed up new customers to come to meetings and take courses. The tall, blue-eyed Nicholls was the band's preferred bait for women, lie was so handsome and devastatingly soul­ful of nature, admirers said, that his sexual magnetism was legendaiy.

In time the San Francisco police took an interest in the Tantrikas, especially the bawdy gatherings Bernard called the Bac­chante Club. An undercover police officer infiltrated the group and later told report­ers that at a meeting he attended he found "men dressed in long black gowns, silting on the floor smoking Turkish water pipes while girls danced before them."

In a city rife with crime and vice, the youthful Tantrikas stood apart for their upper- and middle-class origins. These were not reviled Chinese opium addicts or prostitutes who could be herded into slums, harassed and prosecuted at will; they were mainly well-oil'white kids, acting up in the better parts of the city and embarrassing their parents on the front pages of the dai­lies. And they showed no signs of stopping their activities. Something had to give. As the police made it more and more apparent that the group's presence was unwelcome, Bernard and his Tantrikas began scouting for friendlier dimes. By April 18, 1906, the day of the great San Francisco earthquake, they had already left, heading north up the Pacific coast in search of their next home.

By 1908 membership had grown in the Pacific Northwest—Bernard ultimately opened four lodges in Seattle and one in Portland. As happened in San Francisco, some members mingled romantically with locals, and a few had affairs that came back to haunt them. Jennie Leo made the mis­take of giving her heart to Nicholls, who had never in his young life been known to settle down with one woman. In fact, at the time he was also seeing a woman named Daisy Mix, who was stuck in an unhappy common-law marriage with a wealthy Seattle businessman.

Watching from the sidelines was Jennie's younger sister, Gertrude, who was living with her in Seattle. Seeing her big sister dip in and out of this circle of wealthy and well-connected people, Gertrude wanted very much to be part of it. In January 1909, when she turned 18, she applied for member­ship, and Bernard accepted her. Gertrude, a stenographer with a sweet open face and blonde curly hair, had recently been hospital­ized fora vaguely diagnosed heart condition. Bernard proposed to restore her to health with a series of yoga postures and breathing exercises that would slow her metabolism and strengthen her heart. Both sisters con­sented, and soon Gertrude was living among the Tantrikas in one of their lodges.

Bernard, meanwhile, was anxious to get back to New York, and he proposed that the others in the group move with him for good. He asked Gertrude to come along, suggesting she'd be a good companion for his stepsister, 17-year-old Ora Ray. Ger­trude could continue her studies and work for the organization as a stenographer and teacher of hatha yoga. The young woman agreed to the move, leaving her sister Jennie behind in the Pacific Northwest to nurse her heartbreak over Nicholls.

Gertrude Leo arrived in New York on Mon­day, June 7, 1909. After she dropped her bags at the West 171st Street apartment Bernard had rented for everyone, the two made their way to Battery Park at Manhat­tan's southern tip. The day grew sultry as it stretched on, and they sat for hours in a shady intersection of lawns, gardens and promenades, watching boats rounding the seawall: steamers, ferries and sailing craft coming and going in the busiest harbor in the world. Battery Park was where New York had started its life, so it made a perfect spot

to talk about new beginnings in their new home in the greatest city in the world.

Bernard told his blonde initiate about his vision for the Tantrik Order and the role he envisioned for her. She was to be a nautch girl, he said, like the girls in India who live at Hindu temples and devote them­selves to priests. Gertrude probably knew what he was talking about. The idea of a sacred, sensual temple dancer, wrapped in precious jewels and worshipped by men, was fixed in the popular imagination in 1909. The nautch girl had been Western­ized and glamorized by dancer Ruth St. Denis, who had become a raging success— critical as well as popular—on vaudeville stages across the United States and Europe. St. Denis performed solo and barefoot, her writhing yoga-inspired choreography accompanied by visiting Asian musicians. Moving across the stage through clouds of incense, St. Denis rippled her arms like cobras and swirled her sinewy abdomen in costumes that scandalously exposed four inches of bare midriff. Her choreog­raphy evoked a startling combination of spirituality and sensuousness that stunned audiences into respectful silence at the end of her performance.

Bernard presented the nautch girl role as a new and modern means of feminine empowerment. "All priests," he told Ger­trude, "have nautch girls. In my sacred capacity I cannot marry, but our nautch girls serve us as wives. It is the duty of the priest to give her all the world's best goods. She is looked upon as sacred."

Bernard impressed upon Gertrude his knowledge of psychic powers, real and imaginary, and of the difference between simulative and real phenomena. The ability to produce deceptive appearances was a sim­ulative phenomenon, he explained, common enough among occultists and magicians— Bernard himself was a talented magician who specialized in Hindu disappearing tricks. But the ability to influence others' bodies and souls with his mind was a real phenom­enon and proof of his power. "I am not a real man," he told her, quoting ancient Hindu texts about yoga and supernatural powers. "I am a god, but I have condescended to put on the habit of a man that I may perform the duties of a yogi and reveal true religion to the elect of America."

It was a pretty hard sell, and Gertrude told him she needed to think it over. That night she went back uptown and stayed with Ora Ray at the flat.

The next day she announced her decision to move to the next level of commitment. "I became a novitiate," she later said, just as her sister had before her. "The ends of my fingers were slit open, and the blood was poured upon a pen. Then I signed my name on the document." This document, "the Tantrik Oath," begins with a fearsome warning: "As lightning from the womb of the clouds rends in twain the mighty oak, I pray that the relentless and exacting justice of the law of Brahma, which is as inexorable and all consuming as his love is inexhaustible, may shatter and torture me in agonizing pain beyond the power of speech to describe should I ever deviate from the following affirmations and declarations."

Then followed a call to fellowship and secrecy, vows to value education and trust in the hierarchy of the order, to submit to the teachers and to their ancient wisdom. Time and again, though, the oath cautions all who sign in their blood to "guard my speech and seal my mouth forever to those outside our ranks." Gertrude, assured of her special place in Bernard's life, became his nautch girl and his lover.

By July the Tantrikas had moved to a beautiful new home in a posh neighbor­hood, an ivy-covered brownstone at 258 West 74th Street. Once Bernard's growing spiritual library from the West Coast had arrived from Seattle, he opened the doors of this well-kept townhouse as a yoga school and sanitarium.

Nicholls, Jones and others from Bernard's core group fanned out across New York in search of well-heeled, interested parties— doctors, patients, the sickly, occultists, spiritual seekers and health-fad enthusiasts. The tantric heralds spread the news: There was a new guru in town. Come try our hatha yoga classes, offered several times a week in the evenings, along with instruction in yogic breathing, meditation and philosophy. Or drop by on the weekends during bacchante evenings, when food and drink would be offered and the house would be opened to respectful, curious seekers.

One of Bernard's first clients was a shy, dreamy young woman named Zelia Hopp, who lived with her parents in the Bronx. Zelia was a sickly girl—a worry to her par­ents, who trundled her off to a succession of physicians, praying she would get well and find a husband like her older sister had. In fact it was Zelia's older sister, Esther Betts, who had heard about a famous and pow­erful healer named Dr. Warren who had just arrived from San Francisco. Thus Zelia and the Hopp family were introduced to this talented doctor, who was actually Pierre Bernard, a specialist in the cure of heart troubles, what was called neurasthenia.

In fall 1909 Bernard visited the family for the first time, and he impressed Zelia's mother and father with his obvious erudi­tion, his intentions and the soundness of his methods. His fees were another matter. Zelia held a job as a milliner, but she likely worked for subsistence wages and would never be able to move from her parents' home until she married—which was unlikely to happen if she remained ill. Surely her parents had this in mind when they scraped together the $40 initiation fee—a hefty sum considering the average American worker at that time made $13 a week for 59 hours of labor.

The next day, with her parents' approval,. Zelia traveled alone to Manhattan and arrived at the brownstone, where Bernard, cigar in hand, ushered her into a back room and conducted a physical exam. He con­cluded that yes, he could help her; yes, she could regain her vitality and even flourish under his care. But it would take extreme measures and individual attention. He sent one of his associates to find a suitable place, and in November he installed her in his new sanitarium, a rented apartment at 70 West 109th Street, near Central Park.

Before allowing his daughter to move in, Zelia's father visited the apartment to make sure it was on the up-and-up.

Beneath the cloak of therapy, however, a powerful attraction developed between the worldly 33-year-old Bernard and the 19-year-old Zclia. During her first night at the flat Bernard paid her a visit, and between boasts of his knowledge of spiritual domains he kissed her until she said her breath gave out. She was a lucky woman, he told her—he was very powerful, very wealthy. He assured her of his commit­ment and his honorable intentions. She felt herself fall completely under his power, hypnotized to obey him. Several nights later she surrendered to the most pressing of

his wishes, and the couple made love. Zelia stayed at the apartment for months, enter­taining Bernard's visits until he could no longer manage the rent. She then returned home, cured of her heart trouble and in fine spirits, to her parents' great relief.

Zelia Hopp was very much in love with Ber­nard and visited the busy West 74th Street townhouse whenever she could. That spring she realized parts of the house were kept off-limits to her. She also discovered other young women were on the premises—one of whom also had claims on her lover's heart. Her jealousy flaring, Zelia cornered Bernard and demanded they marry immediately.

Gertrude Leo, meanwhile, was living unhap­pily in one of those cloistered upper rooms, teaching and helping to take care of the house but receiving nothing for it but room and board. Soon enough she and Zelia met, and a triangle of sorts formed.

This was not entirely to Bernard's dislik­ing. He persuaded both women to put aside their jealousies—at least temporarily—and share a bed with him, an arrangement they carried out on at least a few occasions. But the women were in love with their guru, and he simply did not account for the chilling effect his broken promises would have on his fortunes. Several times that spring Ger­trude traveled to the Bronx and visited the Hopp family home, and in early April stayed there for two weeks, both women no doubt counting up their grievances. Gertrude had never been paid for her efforts after trav­eling cross-country to become Bernard's nautch girl, and Zelia was being thwarted in her attempts to marry him.

Finally suspecting that in Gertrude's absence lurked rebellion, Bernard sent Florin Jones to the Bronx to patch things up, insist­ing that Gertrude's presence was urgently required at the 74th Street house—on busi­ness matters, Jones told her. Though she agreed to return to Manhattan with Jones, she promised Zelia she would be back.

When days passed with no word from Gertrude, Zelia became worried. She wrote to the girl's sister in Seattle. By now Jennie had married but still harbored resentment against Nicholls for dumping her. So when Zelia suggested Gertrude was being held at Bernard's house against her will, Jennie decided to go East immediately.

On May 2, Jennie Miller disembarked from her transcontinental train at Pennsyl­vania Station and hurried to her destination, the Hopp apartment in the Bronx—not the apartment where her sister was staying. There she and Zelia finalized their elabo­rate extraction plan for Gertrude. They knew they had to be as swift and silent as Bernard was quick, canny and persuasive. They dressed to go out and made their way downtown to the west side of Manhattan to meet detectives at the 28th Precinct.

Bernard's students and staff were gathered at the house on that mild spring evening, a typical weekday in the life of the Tantrikas. In a dimly lit room on the second floor, Gertrude Leo was leading a class of mostly older people, women and men, under the watchful eye of Bernard. The male stu­dents wore gym clothes; the women were in loose divided skirts or bloomers. All were diligently following her directions, moving through yoga postures. When they needed a breather, Bernard stepped in and answered a question or two: Yes, he said, it was beneficial to bathe every day despite what some doctors said, and yes, there were strong and important connec­tions between the body and mind.

Outside on West 74th Street the police and the two women stole up to the brownstone. It was close to midnight when Zelia rang the doorbell in the secret code: "a long, two short, a long and a short ring, three times," she told detectives in her statement.

The lock snapped and the door opened a crack. With the two women following, the detectives rushed past the butler. The parlor floor was deserted, they deter­mined, but the sounds of chanting could be heard upstairs. The men bounded up the staircase and into the darkened second-floor parlor, where they encoun­tered a scene Detective T.J. Callanan later described as "a young man clad in filmy garments and squatting as a sort of pre­siding demigod among a dozen men and women strangely garbed in tight-fitting gowns of one piece."

"What means this intrusion?" Bernard boomed. Zelia and Jennie rushed in behind the policemen, looking for Gertrude, whom they found dressed in a scanty swimsuit-like garment and in a highly emotional state.

She fell into the arms of her sister, weeping. "For God's sake, take me away. Get me out of this place."

Bernard surveyed the scene and glared coldly at Zelia. "So this is your revenge," he snapped. "You're sore because you're jealous of Gertrude."

One of the tantric women focused a menacing glare on Gertrude and began chanting ominously, " Zim-zim-zim—Zee-zee-zee."

Gertrude, who had been around these other women for some time, was obvi­ously spooked. "She is putting a curse on me!" she screamed.

In the midst of all this, someone doused the lights, but it was clear even in the confusion and dark­ness that the young man in the filmy gar­ments was the person the police were look­ing for.

"You're under arrest," said Callanan to Bernard.

Detective Joseph Leonard, the wise guy of the two partners, pointed at the symbols on Bernard's robe. "What are those things on your chest?" he demanded. When Ber­nard filled him in, the cop replied, "So that's the bunk."

After his initial indignation, Bernard stood calmly before the police. He confirmed his identity and that of the quivering girl in tights, Gertrude Leo. Then the detectives rousted the entire party and moved them down the steps of the brownstone and into the spring night: the officers, the irate witnesses, the young women in bathing suits, the others hissing curses and finally Bernard, wearing the elaborate ceremonial robe of a seventh-degree tantric priest bearing the ancient symbols of birth, death and regeneration.

Together they set off from the brownstone in a comical-looking perp parade, headed for the West 68th Street police station.

As New York awoke on Tuesday, May 3, 1910 the morning papers carried the first news of the midnight raid, arrkst hindu seer, The New York Times proclaimed, says he's a swami, the Herald wrote, his students in tights, added the Tribune. The night-desk editors had done their job, and now a fresh set of reporters arrived for work, reinterviewing the young women complain­ants, who in turn delivered a delicious new detail: Bernard had often referred to him­self as the Great Om.

Somewhere between notebook and news­print an extra o made its way onto that

already foreign-sounding name—rendering it "Oom" in the afternoon editions. By the time newsboys were hawking the Evening Sun, the story had migrated to the front page, great god oom was in jail, read the banner headline. The appellation would stick to him till the end of his days. That Bernard looked nothing like what report­ers thought a swami should look like only fueled their fire. They made fun of his worn suit, receding hairline and wispy "sideboards." The city editors, in a spirit of one-upsmanship—and gleefully aware a hot one had landed on their desks— couldn't help heaping on the defendant all the snide irony and condescension they could fit beneath the headlines. Before he had even faced a judge, Bernard was recast as "Oom, the self-styled god," "Oom the

Oriental," "the great God Oom," "Hindoo Mystic," "Yogi Priest," "Head of Queer School" or just plain "the Oom."

Overnight, Pierre "the Omnipotent Oom" Bernard had become the creation of the powerful print media, and he was one of the first 20th century examples of instant celebrity. In May 1910 there were 13 daily newspapers in New York—publishing morning, afternoon and special editions along with Sunday magazines—and their stories were picked up and syndicated nationally by news services. Juicy scandals sold tens of thousands of extra copies a day, and the biggest dailies, Joseph Pulit­zer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, fought savagely to get them first.

For Bernard, however, the woeful tale

of Oom and his women—complete with Svengali, hapless heroines and aveng­ing angel—coincided with a moral panic sweeping through New York City and the rest of the nation in spring 1910. The press had joined forces with police, purity reformers and the state's vice commission to whip up the public's fear that a conspiracy of international car­tels was selling white American women into sexual slavery with the willing coop­eration of corrupt government officials. Even moguls such as John D. Rockefeller Jr. lent their names to the efforts, and that spring the U.S. Congress passed, nearly unanimously, the Mann Act, still known as the "White-Slave Traf­fic Act," which made it a federal crime to transport an unmar­ried woman across

state lines for "immoral purposes."

Oom looked like the scapegoat everyone had been waiting for.

Bernard was charged with abduction and spent 104 stifling summer days in the Tombs, New York's infamous prison. He was ultimately released, due to the witnesses' unwillingness to testify against him at trial. It would take a decade for him to fully reha­bilitate his reputation, but all the while he carried on his mission of teaching Ameri­cans the practice of hatha yoga. He just did it more carefully.

HE SLEPT AS A HAT PIN CUT THROUGH HIS TONGUE LIKE A FORK THROUGH A " BEEFSTEAK. *j

i — 3

aM Hernard hardly looked like the ^}

swatni mocked in the press. ^J

From The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, by Robert Love, now available from Viking.