The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. By Robert Love, Viking: New York, 2010.

Note: This book is the winner of NEPCA’s 2010 Peter J. Rollins Book Prize.

Yoga is one of the hottest fitness trends in the United States. In health clubs and yoga studios people bend, twist, sweat, and contort themselves in many different yoga “styles” as they seek inner peace and balance. The roots of modern yoga are in Hinduism, Indian philosophy, and the physical-culture movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Robert Love’s The Great Oom is one of many books published in recent years to examine modern yoga. Love is adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, but is best known as the former managing editor at Rolling Stone. He has also worked as a freelance writer and as an editor for Playboy, Reader’s Digest, Best Life, and The Week. Love’s varied background in journalism serves him well in his first book, which explores the evolution of yoga as taught and preached by Pierre Bernard (1875-1955).

The title of the book is a bit misleading. Bernard—known as “The Omnipotent Oom”—did not give birth to yoga; he was merely one of many physical-culture enthusiasts who taught a Westernized interpretation of yoga. Bernard did befriend Swami Vivekenanda, an important Hindu swami who came to America to teach and preach modern Hinduism. More than a history of yoga, Love’s book is a biography of the unorthodox and flamboyant Pierre Bernard, who taught yoga within a conservative political and social culture that made his practices suspect.

Bernard’s training as a hypnotist, his reputation as a social climber, and his Casanova posturing gave him an air of mystery and helped him live a lavish lifestyle that at times got him into trouble. Born Perry Baker in Iowa, he first encountered yoga as a teenager when he met Sylvais Hamati in Lincoln, Nebraska. They moved to California, where Hamati’s young pupil changed his name to Pierre Arnold Bernard. Hamati remained Bernard’s guru for nearly two decades. Under Hamati, Bernard learned yoga postures (asana) and tantric philosophy, read Sanskrit texts, and studied philosophy, science, and ethics.

Bernard borrowed ideas from yoga, Tantra, Freemasonry, and other secret societies to establish his own Tantrik Order in San Francisco. His society met a growing interest in Eastern mysticism. Non-European practices like yoga and meditation were viewed as exotic by the idle rich, but as dangerous by moralists and politicians of the late Victorian era. Yoga often clashed with cultural obsessions with cults, “white slavery,” and the purity of young women. Bernard’s own eccentric lifestyle and propensity toward hucksterism fueled the controversies.

Bernard cultivated (business and carnal) relationships with wealthy individuals to establish his yoga communities in a series of cities around the country. Yoga postures, breathing exercises, and meditation had a captivating effect. Heiresses gave Bernard substantial donations to study yoga, and the scantily clad men and women exercising and performing gymnastic postures aroused the attention of vice squads. Each time Bernard and his followers encountered difficulties (including allegations of adultery, slavery, and kidnapping), they moved on to a new city. They ultimately landed on an estate in Nyack, New York, where Bernard created a thriving community and a substantial Sanskrit library. The “Clarkstown Country Club” was a functioning ashram complete with nubile young women in a circus-like atmosphere that included airplanes and elephants. There, stars of stage and sport practiced yoga and attended lectures alongside Vanderbilts and other wealthy elites. The Great Depression, shifting trends, and personal disputes finally conspired to topple Bernard’s improbable empire.

Love used an impressive array of resources to research Bernard and the cultural environment surrounding yoga in this era. He drew from private papers and unpublished memoirs in addition to newspaper articles and books. One omission in the book is any mention of young Bernard’s reported trip to India to study yoga and philosophy. Love may have chosen not to recount this tale, as there is no known evidence to support it. Bernard may have fabricated his travels to appear more exotic to his followers.

The Great Oom is a fascinating account of health, wealth, and society in the early twentieth century. Bernard’s life and work provide an interesting parallel to the professionalization of medicine, the rise of mysticism, and the growth of New Age philosophy. It would be a useful text for courses involving social trends in health or the history and philosophy of exercise and sport. It is a must-read for all who call themselves yoga students.

Virginia S. Cowen, PhD
Queensborough Community College / the City University of New York