Pierre Bernard (yogi)
yoga and tantra teacher (1875–1955)
Pierre Arnold Bernard (October 31, 1875 – September 27, 1955) — known as "The Great Oom", "The Omnipotent Oom" and "Oom the Magnificent" — was a pioneering American yogi, scholar, occultist, philosopher, mystic and businessman.
Biography
Due to his practice of keeping his origins obscure, little is known for certain about his early life. He is reported to have been born Perry Arnold Baker or Peter Coon in Leon, Iowa, 31 October 1875, the son of a barber. He also used the name Homer Stansbury Leeds.
Bernard was trained in yoga by an accomplished Tantric yogi known as Sylvais Hamati, under whom Bernard studied for years. He met Hamati in Lincoln, Nebraska in the late 1880s, and they travelled together. Hamati taught Bernard the body-control techniques of hatha yoga. After several years of study, Bernard was supposedly able to put himself into a trance deep enough to withstand piercings by surgical needles without anesthesia. He gave a public demonstration of what he termed the "Kali mudra" (a simulated, so-called "death trance") in January 1898 to a group of physicians in San Francisco. During the demonstration, Dr.
The public source identifies “Pierre Bernard (yogi)” as yoga and tantra teacher (1875–1955). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pierre, Bernard and yogi.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7192082. VIAF identifies the subject as 41126865. The Library of Congress control number is n97060683. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1875, 1955 and 1898.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pierre Bernard (yogi)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.