Le néo-paganisme nordisant dans le Québec francophone : une réponse théologique à la crise de sens contemporaine

This study explores the religious imagination of six French-speaking Quebec practitioners of heathen neo-paganism. This type of contemporary paganism, more often referred to as Germanic, Norse, or Asatru, aims to revive the worship of Northern European deities. The question arises as to how these religious ideas are adapted to a secularized Quebec, a minority society among the Anglo-Saxon cultures which are vectors of heathenry and that is undergoing the meaning crisis theorized by Vervaeke, Mastropietro, and Miscevic (2017). The hypothesis is that heathenry in Quebec is best understood as a locally and reflexively adapted response to this crisis. To verify this, two series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants using an approach inspired by ethnomethodology (Coulon, 2014). The theoretical framework draws on Clifford Geertz's hermeneutic anthropology (1973) to interpret the elements of religious meaning that underlie the explicit theology of heathenry. These elements are theorized as theologems (Pagé, 1982), which can be articulated with each other in what Dumont (1987/2008) calls a spontaneous theology. This spontaneous theology was subjected to Paul Tillich's (1951; 1957) correlation method to verify its operational capacity in Quebec's culture to answer to the meaning crisis. The results reflect a spontaneous heathen theology whose central themes are a pluralistic metaphysics built by correspondence to the sensible world, a genders and personalities polytheism that challenges the divine ontology in both theism and atheism, and a perspective of cyclical interdependence, not only of beings, but also of eras. Keywords : Heathenry, Germanic neopaganism, Asatru, Contemporary Paganism, hermeneutical anthropology, Correlation theology, Contextual Theologies, meaning crisis, Quebec.