Oom’s Minerva bigger than Texas

WHO started chanting ‘Oommm’ during yoga exercises?

Yoga students with rolled mats and water bottles became a familiar and unremarkable sight on pavements, in studios and coffee shops all over the US, and other parts of the world, thanks in large part to Pierre Bernard — one of the most eccentric characters America has ever produced.

Still, he was said to be worth some $12 million at one stage, and he once had three pet elephants – and a one-of-a-kind exotic car.

Born Perry Baker on Halloween, 1875, he was said to be the son of a barber, but nobody seems to really know.

He kept details about his childhood obscure — when he didn’t invent them altogether.

He claimed to have spent time in India as a youth and to have met a Persian-Indian swami in San Francisco, who had taught him the secrets of the Orient.

Difficulty corroborating much of his origin story only added to his status.

Towards the end of the 1800s, there was widespread fascination with secret societies and occult practices.

Seances were wildly popular, as were vaudeville acts that embraced the bizarre.

All of these trends helped prepare the scene for The Omnipotent Oom, as he became known in the newspapers of the time.

It was a reference to the chanted ‘Om’ of yogic meditation, and the name stuck.

Baker — by 1898 introducing himself as Bernard — found early success by putting himself into “death trances”.

He allowed an assistant to push needles through his earlobes, nose, and lip.

Always looking to hustle a buck, he soon formed his own secret society, The International Tantric Order.

His preaching of Far-Eastern philosophy and mysticism, not to mention the vaguely contortionist yoga practices that he taught alongside them—earned him a measure of notoriety among civil authorities.

His devoted followers called him Doctor Bernard, although he had no qualifications, yet he became one of the most successful charlatans of the 20th century.

He did, however, have a good understanding of hatha yoga.

In his lifetime, he amassed a 7000-volume collection of works in Sanskrit, and his biographer writes that “this uneducated savant . . . could lecture extemporaneously for three hours on the similarities between the philosophies of ancient India and the Gnostic heresies of the early Christians.”

Oom’s 1929 custom-built Minerva limousine.

At the height of his popularity, Pierre Bernard ordered a custom-built Minerva limousine.

The coachbuilt creation remains one of the largest cars ever built.

His Minerva measured some 5m and had a mass of 4100kg.

It needed dual rear wheels to support its literally elephantine mass.

For the car’s colour, Bernard specified a baby-blue body trimmed with a darker shade on the running boards, mudguards and the window sills and white-walled tyres on matching blue wheels completed the look.

The Minerva’s massive rear passenger compartment measured 3.7m and came with a full set of Wedgewood china tucked under and behind the front seat.

The door pulls and window cranks were made of ivory, and the trim was in burnished mahogany.

Delivered in 1929, Bernard’s limo represented the pinnacle of excess in the era of coachbuilding.

Minerva was a Belgian company founded in 1902 and regarded as a rival to Rolls-Royce.

In fact, Charles Rolls was Minerva’s London agent before he went into business with Henry Royce.

Early on, Minerva licensed a US-designed double-sleeve engine that was noted for its silent operation, and the design helped build the Belgian firm’s reputation for smooth-running, luxurious motor cars.

The chassis was reinforced for heavy use and fitted with a straight-six engine producing roughly 75kW.

The coachwork was done by Paul Ostrok of New York, an elite firm that built customised vehicles for everyone from silent movie stars to Manchurian warlords.

The limousine cost $16,000 when new, the equivalent of nearly AU$650,000 today.

Bernard frequently used his charisma to charm women, especially the wealthy and bored, and we may blame him for popularising the idea of tantric sex.

People were alternately fascinated and scandalised by Bernard’s behaviour, and he spent some time in prison in 1910 for attempted seduction.

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Though he seems to have refuted the most salacious stories concerning his practices, he evidently let the rumours swell just enough to do his advertising work for him.

Most mysterious of all is the measure of respectability he somehow gained along the way.

Thanks to huge infusions of cash from an heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune, in 1918 he created a large compound on the Hudson River.

Known as the Clarkstown Country Club, the New York estate included about a dozen large mansions, a baseball field, aircraft hangers, an elephant enclosure, and a club house with a pool and solarium.

Exotic animals roamed the property, from tigers to elephants to a chimpanzee named Mr Jimmer, who was listed on the books as a night watchman.

There was plenty of wild partying, but also some genuine meditative yoga instruction. Bernard was a conundrum, both hedonistic yet dedicated to the physical and mental discipline required in the practice of yoga.

After his brief rise to celebrity, soon followed by his rapid descent into infamy and scandal, Bernard seems to have retired to a relatively quiet and comfortable later life.

Enjoying an affluent lifestyle, he was known for his lavish wedding and anniversary celebrations, his generous patronage of professional baseball and boxing, his investment in sporting venues like a baseball stadiums and dog tracks, as well as his building of an airport.

Eventually he would assume a more respectable position in Nyack society, becoming president of the State Bank of Pearl River in 1931. Nyack is a village in New York State.

With a fondness for collecting fine vehicles, among them Rolls-Royces, Stutzes and Lincolns, Bernard is said to have been worth over US$12 million at his peak.

“I’m a curious combination of the businessman and the religious scholar,” as he once described himself.

He died in New York City in 1955, at the age of 80.

Today, Bernard’s Minerva is in the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.