Dismantling the Eliadean research programme: Henry Pernet
Eliade's treatment of Australian religions as a blueprint for the primitive, primeval religion of homo religiosus proved to be a turning point in the critical re-evaluation of the entire field.
Four years before Gross' experience, Henry Pernet (1940-), a Swiss freshman who decided to enrol in the Chicago Divinity School because he was fascinated by Eliade's personal charisma, attended Eliade's 1963 class on ‘Primitive Religion', the first part of which was focused on Australian religions (Pernet 2011: 29; Pernet 2012). Already disillusioned with Jungian psychoanalysis and esoteric interpretations, Pernet was looking for a more empirically based and epistemically warranted methodology to approach the study of religion. With such a critical mindset, for the term paper of the class Pernet welcomed a suggestion made by Eliade and approached the ‘instances of the Master of Animals collected in European and Eurasian legends by Leopold Schmidt, an Austrian folklorist' (1952). In his paper, Pernet expressed some ‘methodological reservations' about the comparative system of analysis. This reading ignited a life-long interest in folklore, which eventually led Pernet to study the ritual use of masks in a comparative light (Pernet 2012: 13).The following year, in preparation for the class on ‘Prehistoric Religions', Pernet read a recently published book on Les religions de la prehistoire (1964) by French palaeoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986) and, at the first opportunity, he presented his thoughts along with the book itself to Eliade. Pernet pointed out the epistemological inconsistencies of the ethnographic analogy to interpret prehistoric artefacts as religious, but Eliade, dodging the problem, ‘remained unconvinced' and answered to those criticisms by giving Pernet a signed copy of his recently translated Shamanism, simply telling the young student that ‘Leroi-Gourhan was wrong and that one should not in any case give up ethnological parallels' (Pernet 2012: 15).
Pernet analysed the new English edition and compared it with the French one, and was struck by the following new sentence: ‘recent researches have clearly brought out the “shamanic” elements in the religion of the Paleolithic hunters' (Eliade 1964: 503). This apodictic, and aprioristic, shamanic interpretation of prehistoric religion, based on scanty artefacts and questionable ethnographic parallels inspired Pernet to delve deeper into possible alternative interpretations. Therefore, he prepared a critical assessment of Eliade's main reading for his class, a book on prehistoric religions (Maringer 1960), noting a discrepancy between excessive interpretation and insufficient critical analysis of the data at hand. Pernet focused on Palaeolithic female statuettes, and he went ‘back to the sources that the author cited [to show] that he had wrongly interpreted them' (Pernet 2012: 16). Pernet also started questioning ‘the use of terms like “structure” and “archetype”'. Anyway, Eliade accepted the paper ‘without problem' (Pernet 2012: 16).By early 1967, Pernet was becoming increasingly troubled by the severe criticisms that disciplines potentially considered allies of the HoR reserved to the Eliadean research programme (i.e. anthropology, palaeoanthropology, history). In April, he drafted an extensive methodological discussion for a seminar, entitled ‘From History of Religions to Comparative Science of Religions', which he offered as a contribution to the reassessment of the status of the field. In that paper, Pernet presented an exit strategy and a scientific road map to escape the confusion surrounding ‘a discipline totally lacking unity and, to a large extent, still struggling to find its self- identity' (Pernet 2012: 23; cf. Pernet 2011: 27). His recommendations to abandon the lack of a ‘common method' and ‘goal', the crypto-theological approach, and the recourse to depth psychology, are worth recalling here in their entirety:
1. drop unnecessary presuppositions, such as the sui generis nature of the religious experience and its expression;
2.
renounce the presuppositions of the existence of a ‘trans-conscious' (Eliade 1964: 454) and, in general, refrain from relying on psychological conceptions until they had received some empirical verification;3. abandon the contention that the religious man is the total man, i.e. that total man is religious; to me, this postulate was unacceptable as an onto-theological position (Eliade 1989a: 164-5; note by Pernet);
4. agree on a method of empirical verification that fits both the requirements of a more scientific approach and those of the particularity of our field, granted that this would be found only after a certain amount of trial and error (Pernet 2012: 24).
This paper was accepted in partial fulfilment of Pernet's Master's Degree (AM 1967, Chicago), and, although Eliade never talked to Pernet about it, Eliade reported in his diary Pernet's ‘revolt':
like my other former students Kees [W Bolle] - more or less ‘unconsciously’ - believes that he too can construct an ‘original position’ in opposition to my ideas [K. W Bolle, 1927-2012, had been the first doctoral student of Eliade back in the mid-1950s]. I must add, not all my former students but only those who were closely associated with me, with whom I worked seriously, whom I helped. I’m not angry. It’s natural. It’s the revolt against the ‘father’ (the most characteristic example: Pernet).
15 March 1969; unpublished note from Eliade’s journal; Pernet 2012: 9-10
Unable to understand how science works, Eliade misinterpreted the progress of research, and misunderstood psychoanalytically and religiously any criticism. Indeed, Pernet’s suggestions were doomed to be ignored by Eliade, with whom he discussed in vain. At last, after 2 years of enforced idleness in Switzerland caused by a delay in receiving his visa to go to Chicago to engage in PhD research, Pernet proposed a feasible structure for his dissertation on ‘Primitive’ Ritual Masks in the History of Religions: A Methodological Assessment, and Eliade gave his consent.
However, worn out, Pernet gave up his ambition to produce an entire PhD dissertation on the scientific revision of the HoR (Pernet 2012: 25-6).Pernet eventually obtained his PhD degree from the Chicago Divinity School in 1979, and his critical take on the subject was later re-elaborated and reintegrated in a much later volume about ritual masks (Pernet 2006, originally published in 1988). He also kept on corresponding regularly and amicably with Eliade from 1961 to 1986, among other things, helping the Chicago professor to correct the proofs of the 1968 English republication of Shamanism (Pernet 2012: 97-101). Nonetheless, despite the friendly relationship, Pernet had clearly identified the problems with the unfalsifiable method heralded by Eliade: ‘I had slowly reached the conclusion that Eliade was fundamentally a philosopher [and not a historian]; as such the history of religions he defended was not the science I had hoped to find with him, but an unfalsifiable system in which the main notions were held as postulates’ (Pernet 2012: 25). Even though both Pernet and Gross were forced to withhold criticism while experiencing a temporary academic limbo, for different reasons, there was no turning back: an entire new generation of scholars was slowly discovering the shortcomings of the HoR.