Behind the Bastards - Part One: The First American Yoga Cult Leader

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Robert sits down with Katy Stoll to talk about The Great Oom, America's first Yoga cult leader, and precursor to all the wonderful abusive yoga cults of today. (2 part series) Footnotes: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Oom-Improbable-Birth-America/dp/B004KAB528 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/18/bikram-hot-yoga-scandal-choudhury-what-he-wanted https://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2014/01/bikram-choudhury-yoga-sexual-harassment https://www.gq.com/story/yoga-guru-bikram-choudhury https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/yoga-to-the-people-scandal-what-went-wrong.html https://archive.is/02CTY#selection-763.0-767.586 https://www.history.com/news/yoga-vivekananda-america https://archive.org/details/greatoomimprobab0000love/page/20/mode/2up https://www.npr.org/2010/05/09/126610671/the-great-oom-yogas-wild-ride-to-respectability https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30101/americas-first-yoga-scandal https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/where-is-yoga-guru-bikram-choudhury-now https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/10827/bishnu-ghosh See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some people can't stay in the rain, but at Vessi, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but. Imagine your favorite sneaker styles, super charged with waterproof tech. So whenever you're out sustaining in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessi.com. That's V-E-S-S-I dot com and see for yourself. Vessi. Come alive in the rain. Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Koh Tao looks like a postcard.

But underneath the surface lies something sinister. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island. A dark cloud has come over the island. Death, mystery, and danger. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the bastards. Oh my God. It's a podcast about the worst people in all of history. With me, Robert Evans, the worst podcaster in all of history. That's not fair.

You're right. You're right. You're right. There's um. There's definitely worse. And then. Yeah, sure. I can think of several. I like off top. There's definitely way worse. That's good. That's good. I finally got you to got you to praise me on air, Sophie. That was all. You're wonderful. That was it was that was the long con. I'm like, you're not the worst one. Congrats.

Yeah. Yeah. What I praise. Yeah. That's that. I really feel good. I'm definitely ahead of the guys at the Serial Vapists podcast. Is that a podcast? It was a podcast, Katie. It was one of the back when we were all still working at Cracked. I like after I because the first podcast I listened to was like a hardcore history or something. I was like, oh, this is kind of neat. And I was just like fucking around.

I think I think it was looking for serial because people had told me serial was a good podcast. And like underneath serial popped up another podcast, the Serial Vapists. I've talked about this on air before, but it was like some guys who lived in like North Carolina and just like drove to local vape shops and reviewed them and reviewed a vape shop. Wow. Yeah. It was so funny. That's so great. Also, Katie Stolls here, everyone. Hey, Katie Stoll. One of the best podcasters. Oh, I wouldn't, but that's for my therapist and I to unpack. Thank you.

Katie Stoll, you and I used to used to work together on a podcast that is currently legally condemned by 11 U.S. States. So while we while we get through the litigation, how was your deposition, by the way? I'm not at liberty to say. Oh, right. Right. Of course. Of course. But I'm fucking crushing. Yeah. Oh, good. Oh, good. Oh, good. Sanders really tore me apart on the stand. So that's that's nice to hear.

Katie, how do you feel about yoga? I am so glad you asked. I'm going to get some hate for this. I know it. Not a big fan. Not a fan of yoga. I know. You're so graceful. I would have assumed. Oh, thank you. I do. I do. My body lends itself to yoga. I've got open hips. Like I can do all the positions and stuff. It frustrates me yoga does, which probably is a suggestion that I should do it. But holding a pose makes me angry. And somebody might say maybe somebody we talk about today

that there's some energy moving through me, but it makes me angry. When people say there's energy moving through you. You know, there's something about yoga that it's I always would go to it saying I should do this. And I dropped dropped that completely during the pandemic. I also have a little bit of an issue with how nobody under like there's there's all sorts of understanding. There's different types of yoga. But in LA, it's very much a yoga culture. And and they're always selling something and you got to wear your outfits and all this stuff. You don't got to. But you know, so I have a bad taste in my mouth with yoga currently.

And Katie, that is not going to change today because we're talking this week about two different yoga con men. For you know, I should I should say my part. I've done a decent amount of yoga in my life. I used to do it. I used to do it like every single week. Sometimes I do like a video. Sometimes I'd go to a class when I lived in LA. I would do, you know, I did bickering from time to time who we will be talking about in their second episode this week. And I like it. Like I don't like as a general rule, I hate exercising around other people. It's part of why like as soon as I got a house, like I built myself a gym. I don't do like yoga regularly. But like I do like these days, I do particularly like a lot of hollow bodies and planks because I

hurt my lower back in Iraq a couple of years back. And ever since then, like if I don't I find if I don't do a bunch of both of those things, like every single week, like my back starts to fucking seize up on me. So I value like the the health benefits you can get, which I think are undeniable that there are like significant potential health benefits to yoga. It is probably worth noting that like you can also seriously hurt yourself doing it if you're not like careful. But all of that is kind of beside the point because we're not talking about like the merits of yoga is exercise. I could speak to that. Yeah, yeah, it can be great. We're talking about yoga as a thing that con men gravitate to, which should not be read as like us. We're not we're not trying to

cancel yoga if you like yoga. Also, I just need to chime in again and say like, yes, even though I started off with the rant about yoga, it is objectively beneficial, especially for for depending on your body and your physique. Yeah, with anything you have to go to the right caveats that all exercise has. Yeah, yeah. But but I yeah. So yeah, that's that's where we are. That's what we're talking about today. Again, one way or the other, we're going to take a lot of shit online for this stuff. But like, I do want to make it clear. There's no we're not talking about like we're not trying to like blow up yoga. We're not trying to like reveal the evil that's behind stretching and shit in a group of people. It's just that yoga, like everything else in

American culture lends itself to con men and cult leaders. Yeah, exactly, right? It's not different than like politics or religion, you know, it's this is just another yet another thing that lends itself to con men and cultists. And they're they're different type kinds of con men and cult yoga cult leaders are a special breed. And we're talking about two of them this week. So yeah, I before when I was kind of figuring out how to put these episodes together, I kind of briefly flirted with giving like an overview of like the entire long history of yoga. But to be honest, like, there's so much debate by people who study it about like how exactly to describe the evolution of yoga as a discipline. And I am not one of those historians. So I feel like I would

fuck it up if I tried to go into too much detail that about that. I am going to give, you know, what I think is kind of like the briefest, accurate description of like what yoga was historically yoga as the right approach for sure. Yeah, yeah, because it is complicated. And also, it's part of what's gross about it when I talk about LA yoga culture is just people not understanding what they're talking about in terms of the history or like, you know, the spiritual nature of it. Yeah, yeah. Well, because yoga as you know, when people in LA who have like got their $400 Lululemon like outfits or whatever, talk about yoga, that thing, right? The yoga that you will experience if you type yoga into Google Maps and rock walk into like the

nearest store, right? That's like 100 years old, right? Arguably significantly less. Obviously, a number of the different kind of moves that you do, the different kind of stretches and stuff are much older and some of the concepts are much older. But like yoga as we kind of talk about it is a fairly new thing. Now, obviously, there's also a yoga that goes back much, much further. The earliest yoga teachings are kind of a mix of philosophy and like different sorts of breathing styles and kind of health rules. You can you can kind of compare some of them to sort of the, you know, in the Bible, the Old Testament, you've got these rules like donate, you know, cloven hoofed animals or whatever, like it's kind of some stuff like that too.

Alongside in one kind of branch of yoga, asanas or like postures, right? Development of what became yoga probably started around like 1500 BC. A lot of it is like kind of like 1500 BC to 500 BC is sort of like the earliest period of yoga. Wow. Generally agreed to be. Hey, everyone, Robert here. I just wanted to clarify. If you look into this, a lot of people will talk about, you know, the origins of yoga dating back like 5000 years, which is obviously a bit older than 1500 BC. You know, it depends on kind of what you're talking about. The term, you know, the word yoga is much less old than that. Broadly speaking, without kind of getting into or taking a side because that's certainly not my place. It's worth looking. You can look at

kind of yoga and all of the things that sort of around it and fed into it. Well, there's not like a clean start date, something that's broadly as old in its earliest origins as like Judaism, right? It's in that ballpark, at least. I actually am surprised that that's so long ago. It's so but it would not be. It's nothing like, again, it's not like what you get when you walk into a store. It's like a series of different like meditation or like like philosophical like discussions and I really shouldn't be surprised. But I was like, wow, yeah. Yeah, it's not like stretching and stuff, right? It's much it's much it's a it's like a kind of a philosophical, spiritual like set of like teachings and stuff. Probably the most influential. And

there's a bunch of different branches, right? So like, like, if you were in, you know, Northeast India, right, talking about in someone were to say around like 500 BC, talk about yoga, they might mean something very different from somebody who's like, you know, in Bombay or whatever, Mumbai. That's just like they were different sort of like branches or schools of yoga. And the school of yoga that was kind of most influential to to what people in Los Angeles mean when they talk about yoga is called Hatha yoga, which was heavily influenced by Buddhism. Several of the earliest Hatha texts which date from around 1000 AD or so, focus on the preservation of vital force. This is often embodied by semen or menstrual fluid, which was believed to like

drip out of the body. So there's some like retention of like, you know, vital fluid stuff in there. Hatha yoga translates most directly to the yoga of violence or force. But the violence there does not mean like it's not like beating people up or whatever. It's the the forceful fusing of opposites. Or at least that's how the book hell bent by competitive yoga guy Benjamin Lore. That's how he explains it. Quote, the violence of the violent yoga comes primarily from the method used to achieve these results, the forceful fusing of opposites. It's an ideal embodied in the Sanskrit named Hatha, where Ha stands for the solar masculine energies and thought for the lunar feminine forces and reiterated throughout all Hatha practice. But it is perhaps

best appreciated by the knots, which is like kind of the the guys doing Hatha yoga, principle innovation, postures or bending the body into forms. Prior to the medieval rise of Hatha yoga, standing contortive postures simply did not exist in yoga. The word asana was present, however, it was used almost exclusively in the etymological sense as seat or throne. The asana practices described in pre Hatha yogic literature were meditative postures, firm and stable positions, thrones from which to contemplate existence, right? So initially, this is the kind of asanas is referring to like this is how you sit while you're doing these meditations on these kind of spiritual things. In the medieval period when Hatha yoga, you know, becomes a branch of sort of

the different sort of yogic disciplines or whatever, this expands from just sort of like a meditative posture to more something closer to what we would recognize if we walk into a yoga shop in LA, right? Now, Hatha yogis are kind of religious wild men, right? And this is a thing, this is a big thing in India, actually, you get like people kind of play acting like this, and certain particularly like Pentecostal disciplines in the United States, but like India is a place I've spent a decent amount of time. When you're in certain cities, particularly, you'll see these like crowds of dudes called sadhus who are these like, I mean, they're effectively like kind of wild roving priests, they'll have these like long like often like down to

their feet, dreadlocks and beards that are like painted and these bright like orange colors. And they some of them engage in like these really like in public and stuff, these really like physically like this is like the laying on beds of spikes kind of stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. These kind of like very demonstrative acts of like intense physical demonstrations and whatnot that are kind of showing their the level of mastery and stuff that they have of their body or whatever like this is a concept that goes that is kind of like very common all throughout different kind of Indian religious traditions. And the Hatha yogis were one of like the earlier examples of this. Their yoga included kind of what would sound to

modern people like it includes kind of a peculiar variety of health acts. One of the things they would do was suck water up through their anuses to perform a self anima. Yeah, like self anima is everything. I mean, I don't know how to do that, Katie, but that's a thing they would do. They would like they supposedly they would teach that you can. Katie, are you googling it? I almost did, but I did. But I did put a mark down on my notepad to look at it later. They would also do stuff like they would teach people that if you if you if you could drink the middle third of your urine stream, it would destroy diseases of the eyes or give you the ability to do clairvoyance. And this is again, this is actually not uncommon. There were a lot

of different cultures where like some degree of drinking urine was something that people that was like a part of traditional medicine. And there's a number of Mesoamerican groups who were like mixed urine with tobacco or whatever. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's a thing. Yeah. I was taken aback by by what did you say midstream? So it's not the middle of the stream. Yeah, the middle third collected or do you bend over and you know, again, something for me to Google. I should have I should have looked that one up further. And I do apologize for you. I you know what? This is my bad. I don't need to get hung up on the specifics here, however wild. This is this is kind of as far as I can tell, you wouldn't go wildly amiss and kind

of looking at this the way that most Americans look at like snake handlers in the Pentecostal tradition, where it's like this is not it's not like nobody follows these guys or like nobody thinks that these guys, you know, have something to them. And in fact, a decent number of people probably think, you know, these folks have are right about a number of things. But they're also they're kind of fringe, right? This is not the hatha yogis are not like the most mainstream chunk of the yogic discipline. They're not they're they're like they're they're kind of seen as weirdos at the time by a lot of people, right? I can get that. Yeah. Yeah. In the same way, like a lot of monks, you know, we're seeing traditionally is like, you know, maybe we

think they're holy, but they're also a little right. It's not that you're like disrespecting them. They're there, but it's not representative of how everybody is moving through the world. Yeah, exactly. Hatha yogis engaged in acts of extreme religious aestheticism, like chaining themselves in place for days at a time or sleeping on beds of nails. They were often seen and kind of treated something like wizards in old medieval folklore, right? They're dangerous and they're generally to be avoided. But they also possess potent knowledge. And so maybe you'd go to one of these guys, maybe most of the time you would kind of want to keep your distance because they're weird and like kind of off putting. But like you get like your kid gets sick or something, maybe you

go to them hoping that they know something, right? Because they're seen as sort of possessing this knowledge that can be useful to people who are who are desperate. Now, when the British takeover, the new Raj has no place for anything as strange or as uncontrollable as Hatha yoga. Its practitioners became outlaws banned under a law restricting miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants, which is also an interesting, an accurate description of everyone we hire here at Cool Zone. Yeah, yeah, it is. So interesting. Yeah. And Cody, let's be fair. I know. Yep. I was thinking that too. And our whole team, everybody. So yoga was much wider as a discipline than just Hatha and many Hindu monks still embraced kind of different branches of what many of them.

Yoga is often considered by these guys. They think about it like it's a science, right? They consider it to be a science. And so I think it might be accurate to say that like, if you were to like talk to one of these yogis, you know, from like the 16, 17, 1800s and show them a bunch of like people doing modern day, what we call yoga in LA and be like, this is yoga. It would be like walking up to a scientist with an eighth grade biology textbook and being like, this book is science. Like this is all science. Like this book is what science is. Like, well, no, that's one example of it. But like, there's a lot of other things involved in the discipline. Yeah. Yeah. Also what we, she is probably unrecognizable to them for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in 1893,

a Hindu monk who came to be known as Swami Vivekananda was born to a wealthy family in Calcutta, which was the capital of the British Raj. He became a disciple of a mystic Ramakrishna and took monastic vows right before his teacher passed on, which is kind of a story you hear a lot among these sort of like guru type guys is like, they'll have this teacher, they'll follow them. And like, when that teacher's on their deathbed, they'll make some sort of like vows and stuff in order to like carry on their work. Vivekananda traveled the country for five years before deciding his, it was his karma to go to the United States and spread an understanding of the Hindu faith. The best place to do that in 1893 was the world's Colombian exposition

in Chicago. Back in the day, before we had TikTok and Twitter to teach us about foreigners and various kinds of grind set, people held massive fairs every few years to get an idea of what was happening in the world, right? That was your TikTok, which you'd show up in Chicago or New York. They'd build a bunch of like dangerous fire hazard buildings that looked pretty from a distance. And you'd look at some like Frenchman show you new cannons that were about to massacre people in Africa. It's like a mashup of TikTok and Burning Man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. TikTok, Burning Man and like a Raytheon arms fair. Yeah, that's that's the that's these exposition. Honestly, this feels much healthier just to get it all done at once. Yeah, just do it all at once.

And then the rest of the time, you don't have to deal with it. Yeah. Yeah. You see Andrew Tate one week and then he dies in a structure fire. Like it's beautiful. That's much more tolerable to me. But yeah. So yeah, these were basically early trade shows, except the industry was the human race. And as a result, the Colombian exposition had a world's parliament of religions, which was an interfaith conference with the noble goal of making Americans less chauvinist about their weird brand of Protestantism. Now, a bit of a legend has grown up around this guy and this this meeting at the world parliament of religions that says that he kind of announced to the crowd at the parliament that he considered them sisters and brothers of America. And he was met with rivers

of applause and he used this momentum from this meeting to go in the successful lecture tours where he sold a bunch of books. And he like spread Eastern mysticism all around the United States for the first time. And he he even opened several branches of like a mission on US soil. Pieces of this are true. But painting Vivekananda's speech as an unqualified success leaves a lot out as this right up by Philippe de Slip makes clear. The approval given to Vivekananda at the parliament in Chicago was not unique to him, however. In the account of the parliament published by its president, John Henry Barrows, applause was also freely given to the other speakers as part of the self congratulatory spirit of the parliament. And Vivekananda did not just receive praise at

the parliament. Barrows also noted that very little approval was shown to some of the sentiments expressed by Vivekananda in his closing address. Vivekananda's subsequent lecture tours drew curiosity and interest, but also some hostility. In a letter to one of his American students in 1897, Swami Vivekananda described himself as a much reviled preacher in the United States, which I don't think is surprising, right? That Americans would meet their first Hindu like religious leader and be racist, right? Like that's that's not shocking, you know? I like this seems, yeah, to be expected here. It's the 1890s. I was more surprised with the idea that he was a raving success that immediately as a very successful book tour lecture tour. I mean,

I was like, wow, okay. Yeah, honestly, I'm kind of surprised nobody tried to assassinate him like that's better than I would have guessed from Americans in the 1890s. So he made it out of there alive. He made it out of there alive. You know what? I might raise that flag up on my flag pole today. America, sometimes we're slightly less racist than you'd think. Um, you know what else is less racist than you'd think, Katie? Uh, uh, uh, what? What, Robert? I can't be the product and services that support this podcast. Absolutely. Obviously, Katie. Um, yeah, yes. Sometimes anyway. Yeah, sometimes. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100%

waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again, because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V E S S I dot com and see for yourself. Vessie come alive in the rain from the studio who brought you the number one podcast, the python massacre. This is Death Island. Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Kotao looks like a postcard. It's almost like if you were going to imagine a paradise island or draw a picture of one, that's what Kotao looks like. Young tourists from all

over the world visit the pristine beaches and crystal clear water. But underneath the surface lies something sinister. A dark cloud has come over the island and cast its shadow. Death, mystery and danger. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island. One thing is certain. In this beautiful place, no coast is clear. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. And yeah, better than ever or more or less the same as ever, either way. So despite the predictable distaste that many Americans felt for him, Vivekananda's teachings on Indian religion and mysticism had a significant, I should say on the Hindu religion mysticism,

because this is actually a big problem. A huge number of Indians are Muslim. I don't want to be, and also not just Muslim and Hindu. I don't want to be like the Indian religion is Hinduism. That's a big problem today. But he is talking specifically about the Hindu religion, Hindu mysticism. And his teachings on that topic have a significant impact on what you might call early American seekers. Even at that period of time, there was widespread interest in the East and alternatives to kind of the same old Judeo-Christian claptrap that seemed to a lot of people in this period to be kind of dreary and lacking in avenues to pursue self-fulfillment, right? Part of what's happening in this period is that Christianity has not caught up to modernity, right? And so

people are experiencing this rapid advance in science, but like they're still basically worshiping kind of in the same way they would have in the 16, 1700s. And folks are like, well, this kind of seems boring as shit, right? Especially folks who are like, you know, upper middle class or wealthy, right? It's just not as exciting to those folks and to like intellectuals as this guy, Vivekananda, coming in and talking about this like weird new religion they've never heard anything about. Of particular interest to these early seekers was yoga. Now Vivekananda was a not a big believer in Hatha yoga, nor was he teaching asanas to like large groups of people. He's not leading like what, you know, again, what we would recognize in the modern term is like yoga sessions,

but he did mention various practices that were part of yoga. Although at the time, there was kind of fairly little agreement about what yoga was. Vivekananda spoke about it mainly as a philosophy of self-improvement and often as dietary guidelines to I'm going to quote from Philippe again here. His published lectures in the United States are flooded with the word power, and in one of them he enjoins his listeners to, stand as a rock, you are indestructible. Not unlike in a mobile rock, Vivekananda's approach was devoid of the flowing sequences of asanas or postures that are now commonly associated with the practice. So while he avoided talk of Hatha yoga in public, he did speak more openly about it to his close followers. He admitted to them that in 1890,

he'd gotten interested in it as a solution for his health, but had backed away from his studies after his master admonished him. To audiences, he called Hatha gymnastics and queer breathing exercises. But in private, over the years, he taught small groups of students a handful of different poses, right? So this is kind of a thing that maybe he was a little bit lukewarm on. There was some stuff he found interesting. So when he's got these more dedicated groups of practitioners who walk them through some poses, he'll do probably the very first like yoga sessions like in the United States. But in public, when he's doing his big speed, he doesn't really talk about this other than to kind of broadly mention like, and some people do this, you know, Vivekananda's

time in the United States marks, according to religious studies, lecturer Suzanne Newcomb, a turning point in how Indian religiosity was understood outside of India. In the decades to come, the profile of such teachings would be raised again by a wave of immigrants to the United States, many of whom came to work dangerous jobs on railroads. The government was loath to give them civil rights. And so many of them wound up itinerants, wandering around the country and dispensing spiritual advice because like, what else are they going to do, right? Like, there's not not a lot of gigs, you know, one prominent American writer in 1938 referred to these people as traveling salesmen, writing that every winter, we can find advertisements of the

appearances of yogis in the cities of the East. And during the spring and the summer, they work the back places. But by the end of the 1930s, a revival of Hatha practices in India had brought a wider knowledge of the asanas to the United States. Gradually, many progressive Americans started to view yoga, not as some sort of foreign magic, but as a physical exercise. And kind of that process is pretty steady over like a 20 year period or something like that. But there are some hiccups in it. And probably the biggest hiccup in like the road to yoga being seen as respectable is the life and career of an American named Pierre Arnold Bernard. He's probably the first man to get rich off of yoga in the United States. And of course, he is a white dude, right? It makes

sense that the first guy to get fucking loaded from yoga in the US is a white guy. Yeah, absolutely. That's another thing that's absolutely not surprising. At all. Disappointing. I was, I mean, I was, I had hoped that Vivekananda was going to be the person who got rich and was a bastard, but that's not the way this is. No, I mean, I don't think he is. I don't think he like, I don't, I don't think he was like broke from doing what he was doing, but he does not seem to have. I don't actually wish that in any capacity, but unsurprising that this is enter the white man, enter the enter the white man. Yeah, this is our first yoga grifter. Born Perry Baker in 1876. He met. He changed his name to Pierre. Yeah, he sure did.

He sure did. This, this is before 9 11. It was good to be French. Okay. Thank you for noticing that, Katie. Born Perry Baker 1876. He meets his first yogi at age 13 in eastern Nebraska, which gives you an idea of like how many of these guys are kind of wandering around like a kid in 1899. East Nebraska meets like a wandering yogi, which paints again, we often think differently about America in the past than it would have been. I think that's kind of worth noting. So Perry had long been obsessed with spirituality and the occult. You know, we've talked about this in the Helena Blavatsky episodes. Jamie talks about this in her Ghost Church podcast. The end of the 1800s, early 1900s, there's this wave of spiritism, right?

These like people are doing like channeling and they're talking to the dead and, you know, you've got all these kind of like magicians wandering around the country doing shows. The occult is really sort of taking off in popular culture. And as a kid, Perry's super into this stuff. So when he runs across this Syrian Indian yogi named Sylvais Hamadi, who's a practitioner of Hatha yoga, he's really he's down with what this guy is teaching. Now, I can't tell you if Sylvais Hamadi was like a legitimate for one thing. He's like, I can't I can't like guarantee for you that this guy is in any way teaching legitimate yoga. Like it's the 1890s, you know, who knows what's going on here. But with Sylvais, at least his yoga includes what's described in the literature

I read as magical sex rights that were acts of worship for the goddess Shakti. So, you know, Perry gets on board with this shit. And kind of as a young man, he and his guru move to San Francisco, where Perry changes his name to Pierre, he starts teaching Hatha to interested seekers in charging an exorbitant price for the privilege $100. That's like what it costs to get like initiated into his order so you can like do yoga with them, which is several thousand dollars today. Like he is yeah, he is fucking charging like that's a lot of money today. It's a lot of money to pay 25 bucks, 30 bucks for a yoga class. Yeah, no, you're paying like the equivalent of several grand. Now, you're paying that to become like a member of this sort of yoga organization. So,

you can come in and do like regular although I think you're often kind of like push to, you know, give donations beyond that. Obviously, he's not targeting poor people, right? Why would he? Yeah. Now, this is not a popular business to be in San Francisco was not at this point a willing mecca for the weird. And Bernard was forced to flee with his few followers who called themselves the tantrics with a K you've heard of tantric, you know, yoga or like they are they spell it T a in T R I K in 1906. They moved from San Francisco to Seattle, which was also not yet strange enough to host them. And so three years later, after having picked up and they're picking up people, he's picking up followers like he's running like a little cult and he's

he's getting a little cult. Yeah. Yeah. He picks them up in NorCal. He picks them up in Washington. And then they head east to New York City. Now, by this point, Bernard's followers are calling themselves the tantric order. And they, you know, with the kind of limited funds they have, because they're not doing great. They get by a townhouse, which they decorate in mystic stylings and start to operate as a yoga school and a sanitarium. Now, the best book on Bernard is called The Great Oom by Robert Love. And in that book, Love describes Bernard's early East Coast clientele as a mix of well-heeled interested parties, doctors, patients, the sickly occultists, spiritual seekers and health fad enthusiasts. So this is not a lot's changed. I was going to say.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically like Santa Monica folks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the New York City, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. New York, honestly, New York hasn't changed a whole lot. No, yeah. Quote, the Tantric Herald 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 on back in the evenings when food and drink would be offered and the house was open to respectful curious seekers. And, you know, he's mixing the Tantrics are like not again, this is not you wouldn't like if you were to like bring some yogas over from India, they would have a lot

of notes on what these guys are doing. Back in the doing like back in eight evenings, which is like not, you know, Hindu is is evidence of kind of they're they're mixing and mashing a lot of stuff, but they're using kind of the branding of yoga because it's it's eastern and mysterious, right? And it has you have to think too here, yoga has a common accommodation that's more like if you talk about like magic today again, like then like it does now. Yeah. These people are not just thinking like, oh, I'm going to go get like in better shape and improve my joint health, right? That's not why people get into yoga in this period of time. It's probably more like going to your tarot person or yeah, that's definitely quite but yeah, definitely closer than like, I'm going to

go get healthy, you know, I'm going to get fit. I'm going to get, you know, flexible. One of these early seekers was a woman named Zellia Hopp. She lived with her, which is a pretty cool name out by the way. It's a really good one. Yeah. She lived with her parents in the Bronx and had suffered from a series of ill defined but serious physical ailments. Numerous doctors had failed to offer her any relief or long-term benefit and she was ill enough. It's kind of unclear like what's wrong with her. It seems like it's one of either one of those things where they just didn't have a diagnosis. It might have been just like maybe she had some sort of allergy that at the time. You're right. Everything her parents were giving her like and they just didn't. She didn't eat gluten and she

had no idea. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. We don't really know. But she's ill enough that her parents are terrified that she might suffer from the worst fate a woman can experience. Not being married to a dude. Yeah. Is it being single? Is it being single? Yeah, it's being single. Well, she's a spinster. She's like 21, you know? Oh my God. Don't really. So Zellia's got an older sister, Esther, who had heard the news about the Tantrix arrival in the Big Apple and she told her parents that like, hey, you know, there's these guys, this new order, they're doing this Eastern philosophy that's like got medical aspects to it. And I hear there's, you know, their leader is this guy, Dr. Warren, who's a powerful healer who just come from Seattle.

Now, Dr. Warren is Bernard. This was another name he went under. And, you know, Pierre Bernard is not a doctor. Although I should note when I say that most doctors in 1909 aren't really doctors. Yeah, exactly. So this is not as alarming as it normally is. It's the qualification for doctor and the then was just deciding you are one. Yeah. But so he changes his name. He's not even Pierre Bernard. And he's Dr. Warren. Yeah, right now. It's out of left field there. Yeah. Yeah, at least in his like public phasing stuff. So Pierre told them that he was like, they, you know, they go to him to kind of get a consult and stuff. And Pierre's like, I'm an expert in curing neurasthenia, which is a heart condition that he said that

she had. Now, Pierre, he knows more about medicine than the average person. He's not educated, but he's an autodidact. So he reads a lot of medical texts along with a lot of spiritual texts. And he's really good at like weaving all of this together and like mixing some of this is like legitimate, you know, yoga. Some of this is like different aspects of like Hindu or Buddhist beliefs that he's read. Some of this is like shit he picks up from medical textbooks. And some of it's like probably Blavatsky style like a coat, you know, whatever. And he's pretty good at like mixing and mashing all of this together. And he really impresses the family in his first visit or in their first visit to him. But he still charges them like when after he gets their consult,

they're like into what he's saying. But the price he quotes them to treat her is like outrageous. It starts with a $40 initiation fee, which is, you know, an average American at that point gets about $13 a week for about 59 hours of labor, right? So he's charging them almost three weeks of like full time labor to get it initiated, right? And then there's ongoing charges after that. Also doesn't sound that different from today. No, no, I mean, yeah, this is how a lot of like quack stuff still works, right? We're, you know, we've talked about this in a bunch of different contexts. But her parents are able to put together the funds, even though it's a serious, like it is like a burden for them. And off Zellia goes. Robert Love writes about what happens next.

The next day with her parents approval, Miss Hop 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. Zellia's father visited the place to make sure it was on the up and up before allowing his daughter to move in. Beneath the cloak of therapy, however, a powerful attraction developed between the worldly 33 year old Bernard

and the 19 year old Zellia. Her first night in the apartment, Bernard paid her a visit in between boasts of his knowledge of spiritual domains. He kissed her until 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. So yeah, that's that's that's problematic. We could say, you know, he's supposed to be her doctor. She's living in a sanitarium that he runs. You know, the age gap's a little bit problematic too. Like there's a lot that's problematic about this.

A lot that's problematic. Yeah. Zellia becomes a living at the Tantric House, where the two make love on a regular basis until her family stops being able to pay for her treatments. At that point, she is kicked out of the sanitarium. But when she gets back home, she's apparently free of her heart condition, like she feels better. So I don't know, maybe she just needed like, I don't know, you know, like, maybe she just needed to get fucked. Who am I to say? So for a while, her parents are like, well, it was worth it, right? Like she's feeling better. You know, they don't know exactly what's happened, but they see that she seems to be in better health. And that's mostly what they care about. So for a while, everything's fine. But Zellia's turnaround

had more to do with the fact that she'd fallen in love with Pierre than the healing power of whatever he was advertising as yoga. A modern person might have recognized that a dude who kicks you out because you can't afford the rent in his unlicensed hospital is not your soulmate. But these were more primitive times and lifetime original movies hadn't yet taught that message to people. The business at the Tantric House continued to evolve. They developed an enrollment contract for potential students, which offered them either an upfront fee of $100 or three monthly installments of $40 each. For $20, Bernard would give you a physical examination. And for just $2, you could acquire your very own copy of their newsletter, the Journal of the Tantric Order.

Yeah, which I'd love to get a copy of if anyone runs into one out there. Journal of the Tantric Order. Yeah, that sounds good. Initiated students could attend yoga classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Pierre, an early trailblazer, realized that the best way to get repeat customers was to put the hot chicks in his flock up front and center. His best instructor then was Ora Ray, real name Gertrude, who wore, quote, yogi suits, skin tight, colored tights covered in Tantric symbols that were basically the only attractive clothing that anyone wore in a similar, like this is this is like the early 1900s, right? Everybody's like, yeah. This is prototype Lululemon, right? Yeah, exactly. He's a trailblazer. Yeah. So, so I have him to blame for the yoga

outfits. Yeah. Yeah. He is he is the guy who's like, well, if we just like get attractive people to wear yoga pants, we can get all sorts of folks to just come in and hang around, right? Like, this is this is how we make money, you know? Oh, God. So, Love writes that many of their customers were, quote, older men in search of rejuvenation, which often came from young women teaching them to stand on their head and making strategic physical contact to guide them in the asanas. These older men were often comparatively well off, which was required to afford the blistering fees Pierre charged. He appeared only sparingly in classes to lecture his students on spiritual matters and give them his own esoteric advice on health and diet. Zelia continued

to visit whenever she could. And over time, she grew concerned and suspicious about how many of his followers were attractive young women. She was also frustrated. Yeah, I bet she did. She was also frustrated by the fact that he kept sections of the townhouse off limits to her for obvious reasons. Okay, so are they still dating in some capacity here? Is he charging her? She would say they're dating. Pierre would say they are not dating, right? Like, I think that's kind of like that chick just won't leave me alone. I mean, you know, I'm teaching her, right? Like, she's a she's a student, you know, I'm teaching her in the only way that I can. So eventually, she demanded that he marry her if she was going to keep dropping by and, you know, putting out.

Somehow, the state of affairs ended with Gertrude and Zelia meeting and Pierre talking them into having a threesome with him. So now, Katie, that that sounds gross, right? Like, that's that's that's problematic. But it kind of goes in a good direction, because Gertrude and Zelia in an unlikely fashion, like, become friends. And they start talking without Pierre there about the way he's treating them both. And Zelia starts asking Gertrude questions like Zelia, like, you would expect, you know, especially given the time, like even today, you'd expect Zelia to be like, fuck Gertrude, fuck this lady who's like getting in between me and this guy. But Zelia is like, has he been paying you for all the work that you do teaching yoga classes? And Gertrude's like,

well, no, he's not paying me. And Zelia is like, you know, that's fucked up, right? Like, you know, you should be getting paid to do this job. I like this turn for sure. I like these two women. Um, good, good job, girls. Also, there's part of me that's also like, what year are we at right now in the timeline? This is like 1909, 1910. I do love I do like the introduction of a little threesome situation in the early 1900s. In general, I'm not against it. I just don't like a man demanding it. No, but I do like that it is a it is a threesome that a man institutes problematically that ends in the two women becoming friends and being like, wait a second, he's not paying you for your labor? Like, whoa, we got a fucking deal with this. I'd watch that movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the story

there's some actually there's some fun beats coming up. But you know what's even more fun than the romantic equivalent of unionization. I got it this time. Is it advertisements? It is. It is advertisements. It is advertisements. The romantic the romantic unionizations of products and podcasts. That's right. That's right. That's right. We're back. So, so Gertrude and Zellia start talking and Gertrude realizes like some people can't stand the rain. But at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So whenever you're out sustaining in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles

like a kid again, because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V E SSI.com and see for yourself. Vessie come alive in the rain from the studio who brought you the number one podcast, The Python Massacre. This is Death Island. Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Kotao looks like a postcard. It's almost like if you were going to imagine a paradise island, they'll draw a picture of one. That's what Kotao looks like. Young tourists from all over the world visit the pristine beaches and crystal clear water. But underneath the surface lies something sinister. A dark cloud has come over the island and cast its shadow. Death, mystery and danger. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have

died mysteriously on the island. One thing is certain. In this beautiful place, no coast is clear. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is, you know, oh, yeah, this is a really fucked up situation. And so she bounces. She she abandons Pierre and the tantric order. And Zellia is like, you can come crash with me and my parents. And so she starts, she's like living with Zellia and her parents. I don't know what Zellia tells her parents. Yeah. Like, I'm gonna guess she doesn't bring up the threesome, right? This is my friend. Yeah, this is my buddy. Yeah. But like Gertrude crashes there for a for a while. Pierre gets worried after a period of time, like that she's

been absent for so long. So he sends one of his followers to talk her into returning. And he's like, you know, we need you here. We've got like some business stuff. Like this is like, especially if you want to get paid, like you got to come back and like we got to take care of some things. So Gertrude's like, all right, well, I'll go back with you to like deal with this, because maybe it'll work out. But she promises Zellia, I'm going to come back like I'm not going to stay there, obviously. So Gertrude leaves and it's supposed to be just for a little while, but days go by and Zellia starts to get worried. So she writes to Gertrude's sister in Seattle. And in the letter that Zellia writes Gertrude's sister, she kind of insinuates Gertrude might

be being held against her will. Zellia doesn't really know what's going on, but she knows Pierre. She kind of knows the vibes and she's like, I think something fucked up is going on. So Gertrude's sister travels east and like travels east with like fucking hell on her mind, because she had not been happy when Gertrude had left Seattle with this guy. So she's kind of been like waiting for something fucked up to happen. So she travels east with the intention of like fucking shit up for Pierre. She had also, it's also probably worth noting, she had been dumped by a member of the Tantric Order earlier. So she also has, yeah, yeah, yeah, her sister adds. There's like, she's got a little bit of a grudge too. Yeah. These are, this is a messy story.

This is chaotic. You can make, although again, there's a, there's a pretty good like Hulu plus, you know, original series in this. Absolutely. So she and Zellia, Gertrude's sister and Zellia go to the police with lurid stories of like dark sex magic and presumed unlawful imprisonment. And a few nights and the police like take it seriously. And so a few nights later, you know, classes are going on at this, at this townhouse where, where Pierre runs, you know, his order out of and during classes, Zellia comes to the door of the townhouse and she gives, they have like a secret knock. So she gives the secret knock and whatever guys at the door opens the door for her and a bunch of New York detectives, Russian. And they find, you know, when they bust in,

what one detective describes later as quote, a young man clad in filmy garments and squatting as a sort of presiding dimmy god among a dozen men and women, strangely garbed and tight fitting gowns of one piece, which is a very funny, like an old timey description of like people in yoga outfits. Yeah. And yoga outfits. Yeah. Proto like early yoga outfits, gin one. So they also find, yes, squatting. They also find Gertrude and she is dressed in a revealing swimsuit like garment and nearly hysterical with fear. When she sees her sister, she sprints over to her and begs her for God's sake, take me away. In his book, the great love described continues the scene quote. Bernard surveyed the house and glared coldly at Zellia. So this is your revenge.

She snapped your 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, ZZ Z. 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 Callahan, the detective 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 out from the brownstone in a comical-looking perp parade, headed for the West 68th Street police station. It's, yeah, again, great Hulu series in this whole story. Wonderful, wonderful scene, right there.

It's so funny. I also was like, I wonder if they're doing, I do know a little bit, Hatha breathing, the Ujaya breathing. Yeah, yeah. Or at least like whatever, because you know, you have to assume like whatever teaching they're getting is probably like translated through a couple of different books and language barriers, like. I mean, it sounds like they're hissing or whatever. But there is something in there that is, and I'm just imagining everybody doing that. Yeah. So news of the arrest quickly ripped through the city. The New York Times headline the next day read, Arrest Hindu Seer. The Herald added, says he's a swami and the tribute noted, his students in tights. Pierre was locked up and charged with abduction and accused of having

invagaled and enticed Zelia. When he finally showed up in court to be arraigned, the judge asked, what is this man, a doctor? The detective responsible for the case replied, no, he's not a doctor. He's a Hindu teacher. He claims to cure people by controlling spirits. Now, Bernard did not look very much like a yogi. He is a balding, like Irish American dude in his 30s. He could have passed for a banker in the right clothes. Yeah, that's what like the headline, Hindu, whatever. Arrest Hindu Seer. A portly old white man. He's like, he's like 33. But like, yeah, he's not, he's not like, he does not look particularly mystic. Yeah. The detective added, when we got upstairs, we saw eight elderly men and five women in tights and bathing costumes. They were just exercising.

They were tumbling on a mat, which had strange figures on it. The defendant was standing by a crystal ball and was clad in tights that came to his knees in a jersey on which there were some queer figures. So again, that's like the kind of and that gives you an idea too of like who they're they're going after because like Pierre has these young women who are like basically working as instructors. And then these old men who are presumably wealthier, who are basically paying to like hang out with a bunch of attractive young women wearing tight clothes and stretching, right? Like that is that is what he's offering, you know. Also, it's New York City. Yeah, it's New York City. It is interesting to me that a crystal ball is involved. I've done a number of yoga

classes, none of which involved a crystal ball. Never, never. Although look, I'd show up for that class maybe. I'd show up for that class. Yeah. Yeah. I have different emotions around this. Well, we still have story left. Yeah. I do. I do wish that my yoga involved a Palantir though. Yeah. Yeah. Saruman like does puts like a 60 minute yoga video. Oh, no, that would be fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Staff yoga. So Bale is set at $15,000 and Bernard is sent out of the courtroom. As he's leaving, Zellia's father sprints up and shouts, that man ought to be killed and I do it if I could, which is, you know, solid parenting. Well, Pierre languished in jail, a reporter from the evening mail managed to secure an interview with him. Perhaps given the desperate state he

was in, or perhaps just due to his exhaustion and the skill of the interviewer, Bernard was uncommonly honest. He told the journalist, I never lived in India. The whole scheme is physical culture. That's all. Only some of those nasty tongueed women got busy. You know, if you pay more attention to one than you do to another, she gets jealous. This whole white slave business was too much. Wonder they didn't hold me for murder. All right, Pierre. Fucking Pierre. Drag this motherfucker. Fucking Pierre. Now, you'll note that he mentions he says that this is physical culture. That's a savvy move by him. Now, we've done a pair of episodes on Bernard McFadden, who was like the first big workout exercise guru in like American pop culture right around this time.

He was like, yeah, he's running a bunch of big magazines that are like one is called physical culture. So with Pierre is as he's being interviewed by this guy, he's trying to, you know, normally when he's like trying to con people into giving him money, he wants to portray himself as like this eastern mystic who has access to like magical powers. When he's in trouble, he's like, no, I'm just like this guy who's like popular and rich and famous, right? Like this is just another kind of physical culture, you know, it's like lifting weights. He attempts to do that only when he's in trouble. But I think that is interesting. Yeah, it's smart. Yeah. Yeah. So another trend that is sweeping the nation, like physical culture is a trend that's sweeping

the nation in this period of time. And he's trying to tie himself into that once he's in trouble. But another trend that's sweeping the nation is a panic over the existence of what are generally referred to as white slavers. The same day that Pierre was arraigned, a 27 year old Russian named Levinson confessed to selling young women with the aid of two. And like he uses a word for black women that we don't anymore. Jenny Miller, Gertrude's sister saw kind of tying in what he had done to this like white slave or panic as a savvy way to get revenge on Pierre. So she told the press that the tantric order was engaging in an even quote higher order of the of the white slave traffic, adding wealthy women, women whose fortunes run high into the millions

are prime movers in this traffic. This story gets messier and messier. There's a little bit of like proto QAnon stuff in here. Yeah. Now the tantric order and yoga in general became the center of a scandalous news cycle, one that galvanized much of New York high society against the very concept of Eastern mysticism. As always happens with media frenzies, there was a period of several weeks where any newsman who could come up with a bloody minded story about evil yoga colts could claim to be sure of a paycheck. Some of them sat down with anyone from the West Coast who would claim to have been a former member of the tantric order. And a lot of these people were just like lying, right? For whatever reason. But others journalists started digging through

various Hindu texts, often like bad translations of Hindu texts that they only partly understood, looking for anything that they could like tie into this broader thing, right? That they could like, ah, here's another, you know, it's the it's the journalism hasn't changed either, you know, in the century or so. I mean, all of this feels eerily familiar. Yeah. It's very, very modern story. Yeah. In the great um love rights quote, report surfaced in the press on the most salacious details of Hindu tantric practices. A diligent New York world reporter had turned up a copy of Bernard's Vera Sadhana and published excerpts under the headline, tantric worship calls for dead bodies and young girls. Since the Vera Sadhana was a compendium of a bridged mystical tracks and

translated Hindu writings that were long on metaphor and symbol, um's enemies found everything they wanted. They picked from a combination platter of yoga's alleged supernatural powers, sex rituals, phallic worship, and yes, even a mention of medieval Hindu rights that used dead bodies. When apprised by a reporter that some of the texts he published were salacious in nature, Bernard answered wistfully, that's the trouble with people. They so readily misunderstood any true conception of the system. Hmm. And a lot of this is like, you know, that you can find like texts in pieces in the Bible, pieces in like literally every religious texts that like most practitioners will say are like, well, that's a metaphor that's not meant to be literal. Like,

and also it is like, I don't know the quality of the translations he's getting, but people are finding stuff from like these medieval texts that like are fucked up sounding to modern ears. And he's kind of just like printed out in order to have something to sell. And they're accusing them of like stuff he's not doing, right? Like at the end of the day, Bernard is like a creep and probably a rapist, a sex pest. But he's not like sacrificing people or like, you know, doing rituals with dead bodies, you know, he's like a pretty pedestrian kind of creep. No, I mean, you could also add in a grifter, maybe, or, you know, appropriating something, not understanding what he is. He's teaching, not teaching it at all. Yeah, definitely.

But not doing those things. I'm not an expert on yoga or on Hindu mysticism, but I do not believe crystal balls feature prominently. No, I've never heard of that. Yeah. So a lot of it's also kind of worth noting that again, while he is definitely a sex pest, a lot of what got him damned by the press in his day are statements that were just too pro-sex and even sometimes pro-woman for the era. One passage from the Vera Sadhana was particularly outrageous to people in 1910 New York. Sex worship as a religion represents a stage in the development of the human mind and the grand theologies of today are the outcome of this mode of worship. It constitutes the basis of all that is sacred, holy and beautiful. The whole

world is embodied in the woman. Now, yeah, that's heteronormative, but to most people in 2023, that's not what you'd call like a particularly offensive statement, even if it is a bit reductive and horny. That said, as the arraignment went on, the allegations continued to pour out. Some were likely true and some were exaggerated or just false. Zelia, who was never a full initiate, told lurid stories of blood oaths that either were exaggerated. She's in kind of a heightened state when she encounters this, but I don't think anyone was doing any serious like blood magic or whatever. But she also told like stories of like orgies and sort of like sexual like being pressured into having group sex and stuff that definitely did happen, right?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, things got really dark when Gertrude took the stand, though. She alleged that on September 17th, 1909, Pierre had threatened to drug her with morphine when she became what he called hysterical. She said that he kept her prisoner with his hypnotic powers. Now, obviously, I'm not like a particular believer in hypnotic powers, but I certainly believe that a mix of drugs, the mind-altering impact of cult dynamics and good old fashioned gaslighting can have the effect of keeping someone a prisoner without having them chained to a wall, right? We've seen it time and time again. It happens all over the world. Yeah. Accounting for the time frame that we are in as well, where I am imagining these women being swept up in this and really not having

the tools to understand or remove themselves from a situation. And even like even if they'd had sort of in a culture that had given them more tools, this exact story, cult leaders plying followers with like a mix of drugs and gaslighting and sexual abuse, that happens. That's happening. There's thousands of people living that life right now, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I also do not mean to suggest that, you know, people now should know better or whatever. I'm just imagining at that time being like, it's even an element of magic and, you know, and yes. Well, and also today, if you get out of that situation today, there's infrastructure to help you, right? Even in that infrastructure, just you can find books that people have written about going through similar

experiences and the way cult dynamics work. That doesn't really exist for someone like Gertrude, you know, in 1910. She told the court, quote, I both feared and loved him. He made me believe that he could communicate with priests of the order all over the world who would sit in council at his command and take away my mind if I did not obey him. And one of the heartbreaking dimensions about this is that in order to lay out the abuse that both women absolutely experienced, Zellia and Gertrude had to admit to having premarital sex. In Gertrude's case, this involved sex with a number of men as part of sexual rights. Some of this does sound very satanic panicky, but part of why I tend to like why I believe like what they're saying is that Gertrude and Zellia,

they suffered massive personal consequences for doing this. Going up in front of like a court and saying that you had sex outside of marriage in this period of time closes off opportunities for you as a woman. Yeah, this isn't something you just do. No, no. It's also not something people just do today, but there's even more consequences. It's like, yeah, it's a big deal. Yeah, very brave of them. Yeah, it's just like a very brave to, yeah. It's a terrible situation for them to be put in. As the Atlantic Constitution put it in one headline, ruin brought to this woman by high priest, right? Like that's the way it's being, like she's been ruined by him, you know? The judge did decide to sustain the charges and a grand jury later

indicted Pierre on two counts. The newspapers started referring to him derisively as the great Ohm. His followers dissolved and the townhouse lay vacant while he languished in jail waiting for his trial. But as the weeks ticked by, his lawyers found what they called evidence against Gertrude's previously chased character. They alleged that she had lied about her age and that she had slept with someone outside of marriage previously. Pierre's lawyer offered to produce these claims and witnesses to them in court. So the DA dropped Gertrude as a witness and to complain it, right? He dropped the charges based on Pierre's abuse of Gertrude, because this lawyer was like, I found evidence that she had sex outside of marriage once.

Like that's the time we're in. He reduced bail on Pierre, but the case did go forward. At this point, though, Zellia decided that she too wanted off the case. Her family said that she had moved out of state. She wanted the charges. She just wanted it to end. The way her family described it is that the case had nearly driven her insane. Yeah, I think it was just too much for her. And once Gertrude kind of was out, it was like, I can't, I can't go through this like the just by myself. Yeah, yeah, it's horrible. They're in they're both in a horrible situation. Eventually the case folded and Pierre was released a free man. But a stain had been left on yoga that would take decades to wash away, as Robert Love wrote in this column for mental

flaws. The next year, a Christian mystic named Evelyn Arthur C was arrested in Chicago and charged as a white slaver. His trial was a virtual replay of the Bernard proceedings. Meanwhile, back in New York City, esoteric psychologist Dr. William Latson, who taught Hindu dancing as a way of freeing his female patients from their liminal restraints, committed suicide in his office. Combined with Bernard's notoriety and C's conviction, the Latson scandal turned public sentiment against yoga and mysticism. Newspapers began publishing feature length exposés blaming yoga for domestic infelicity, insanity and death. The federal government opened official investigations against various swamis and Hindu priests. America was fascinated, horrified and

obsessed with what the Washington Post called this soul destroying poison of the east, the tragic flood of broken homes and hearts, disgrace and suicide. Yoga had become public enemy number one. There she goes again. Good old America. Good old America. Now, Katie, no moral panic is stronger than the desire of upper middle class white people to feel connected to something that makes them different from the people they play bridge with. So Bernard was eventually able to establish several successful yoga schools. He rebuilt his he rebuilt his cult. He became fabulously wealthy. He established a sizable compound with a herd of elephants in it. I believe somewhere like upstate New York. It's in somewhere in the northeast.

And he worked with a number of the wealthiest people in the country at the time, including the Vanderbilt daughters. Yes, he's extremely successful. If you want to learn about this guy's whole life story, I really recommend Robert loves the Great Oom. It's an interesting, well written book about this fella. Yoga itself languished until the late 1950s, when enough distance from the moral panic years allowed a new generation to see it as simply a secular exercise remedy. It was still transmitted to people largely by white Americans like Richard Hittleman and Lilias Fohlen. Television was key to this spread. It made it easy to show people different poses in a manner that seemed straightforward and absent the trappings of

mysticism that had made Pierre Bernard seem so shady. Then the 1960s hit, the hippies all started doing yoga and the New Age movement took off. And in the middle of that process, a young Indian immigrant would introduce the continent to a new version of yoga. His name was Bikram. And we're going to talk about all that in part two, Katie. Oh, I cannot wait. I can't wait because it don't have to wait long. We're going to record it immediately. We're going to we're going to talk about this like 10 minutes. Yeah, but the rest of you have to wait. You get away like a day or so. Motherfuckers, shitheads. That was a loud ride. Very interesting. Yeah. And I'm excited for that. Thank you. So am I. Katie, you got any plugables to plug? Wow. I guess so. I guess.

Problematic. I guess I do. I guess I'd like to tell you guys about our little show called Some More News. You've heard me talk about it before. We have a channel called Some More News that our friend Cody Johnston hosts and I'm on and we have a podcast called Even More News. You can find both of them in the same audio feed. And, you know, we're on social media and stuff like that too. And also, I'd like to promote next week's episode of this show. Part two of this episode. How cool. That's what I'd like to promote today. Robert, anything you we lost Robert? Oh, Robert Scott. Robert Scott, you know what, guys, that's it for us here at Behind the Bastards. Robert has dropped off the Zoom and now we've taken control. What do we want to do with this power?

I don't know. Oh, god damn it. He's back. Jesus Christ. He's back. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Are we still recording or did we end? Well, we're ending now. We're ending now. Well, we said some really horrible shit about you and I've asked Chris to bleep all of it. Wow. Yeah. Well, that's good. That's good. That's good. I felt appropriate. Anyways, bye, motherfuckers. Bye, motherfuckers. Yeah. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Some people can't stay in the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles, super charged with waterproof tech. So whenever you're out sustaining in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V-E-S-S-I dot com and see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Koh Tao looks like a postcard, but underneath the surface lies something sinister. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have

died mysteriously on the island. A dark cloud has come over the island. Death mystery and danger.