Thomas Rowsell's Blog

 

Faith, folk and the far right

 

Two faculty members of an American International University in London, Dominic Alessio and Robert J. Wallis, have demonstrated the poor quality of their research and their commitment to perpetuating outright falsehoods and scaremongering with the publication of a new book titled ‘Faith, Folk and the Far Right.’ The intention of the book seems to be to generate religious hatred and fear towards Heathens. 

A number of demonstrably false claims are made about me in the book, all of which serve to prove the partisan, dishonest and sensationalist nature of the book as well as the sloppy research it is based on. I shall list some of them here:

 

 That I am a member of the Odinist Fellowship and that this charity is racist 
FACT: My group, the Hearth of Devon is no longer affiliated with the Odinist Fellowship since 2023. The Odinist Fellowship is not a racist charity.That I attended a “Fascist” event 8 years ago in Stockholm. Repeating an unsubstantiated claim by UK activist pressure group Hope not Hate, the authors describe an Identitarian event as Fascist, which ignores the actual definition of these highly distinct schools of thought. 
FACT: I have never attended a Fascist event.That Dan Capp, a musician who performed at my Pagan Futures Conference is “far right” 
FACT: Dan Capp’s ideology is not right wing in any conventional sense and his music performance had no political meaning or lyrics at this conference."Rowsell’s videos include Ariosophic-inspired themes such as the ‘Real Hyperboreans".
FACT: None of my videos, including ‘Real Hyperboreans’ published 8 years ago, have any influence from Ariosophy. I reject Ariosophy entirely. The video references an outdated theory by Indian researcher Bal Gangadhar Tilak and then contrasts this with current genetic findings from four peer reviews scientific papers linked in the description."(Real Hyperboreans) purports to give a more scientific defence for the existence of an ancient and ‘robust’ Northern Eurasian civilisation." 
FACT: I never described a civilisation among the primitive ANE Hunter-Gatherers of Siberia. "he film suggests that the bloodline of these ‘Aryan’ peoples disappeared due to ‘race mixing”
FACT: I never said anything about race-mixing or bloodlines. I talked about the autosomal ancestry of ANE inherited by later peoples as was demonstrated in the linked sources eg. Nick Patterson et al,, Ancient Admixture in Human History, Genetics, Volume 192, Issue 3, 1 November 2012, Pages 1065–1093.Then the authors mention an even older video, published 10 years ago, and claim that it “ends with a critique of international bankers that includes, alongside the narrative, a Nazi-era image of a Jew. What is more, the emblem of the production company at the end of the film, ‘Lucio Films’,is a crossed L and F, thereby resembling a swastika. 
FACT: 10 years ago I commissioned a freelance video editor named Lucio to create this video. His logo is simply the letter L and F and any resemblance to a swastika is purely coincidental. The image they claim to be a “Nazi era image of a Jew” is neither, but rather a stock image licensed by Clker-Free-Vector-Images — Pixabay (CC0) and depicts a caricature of Scrooge from Dickens’ a Christmas Carol. It is widely used in modern left wing propaganda as an image of a white Western capitalist and did not exist in Nazi Germany. (very poor research!!)They claim that a video, published 7 years ago, entitled ‘Hebrew Anglo-Saxons? Medieval Conversion Tactics’ is “anti-Semitic” and an ‘Ariosophic-inspired narrative’ and that I, Tom Rowsell “makes the ... argument that Jews used ‘propaganda and psychology’ to trick the heathen Anglo-Saxons into converting to Christianity”
FACT: At no point in the video do I say anything anti-Semitic or anything inspired by Ariosophy. I quote Christian sources by Christian authors who attempted to convert Anglo-Saxon Heathens. At no point do I attribute any of the quoted sources to Jewish authors or claim that Jewish people had any direct role in the conversion of the English people to Christianity. The video only mentions Jews in the context of the Biblical Hebrews that are referenced by early Christian authors in England. There were no Jewish people in Anglo-Saxon England. 
The truth of my statements can be verified by simply watching the videos which are all still up because none of them breaches the YouTube terms of service. It is worthy of note that the authors ignored all of the dozens of videos I have made in the last 7 years. This should be seen as a tacit admission that nothing I have made is remotely racist in that period. The three older videos from much earlier are also not racist or anti-Semitic, despite what the authors claim, as can clearly be seen when viewing them. 

Alessio has previously contributed to Mainstreaming the Global Radical Right: CARR Yearbook and to The Radical Right During Crisis: CARR Yearbook 2020/2021showing that he is primarily a left-wing activist and not a genuine scholar.

I urge all readers to write to Richmond American University London and to complain about these egregious, slanderous lies. enquiries@richmond.ac.uk

 

 

I was recently interviewed by Lee Hall on the British Thought Leaders programme for NTD tv.

 

Basque people have unique ancient traditions that they still preserve such as the fox dance "Azeri Dantza" in Hernani where a man wears the skin of a fox and whips people with the inflated bladder of a pig! This derives from ancient Roman pagan traditions of Lupercalia and Bacchanalia.

 
 

Anglo-Saxon England was racially diverse according to a new genetics paper 'West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset published in Antiquity journal. But is Duncan Sayer misrepresenting the evidence? How significant are two skeletons with 1/4 black ancestry and have they failed to notice middle eastern ancestry in Updown Girl?

It is also worth nothing, as I did not mention it in the video, that the archaeologist Duncan Sayer, named author on the new paper, was the one who has been pushing for said paper since 2022 when Updown girl's sample was published in the supplements for the Gretzinger et al 2022 paper on Anglo-Saxons. 

The 2022 paper undermined a nonsense piece Sayer had written in 2018 for The Conversation in which he denied that English people share a common Anglo-Saxon origin and pretended that the fact the Germanic migrants mixed with Britons was a revelation and an own. This has always been known though, and no one ever denied it. He used the piece as a means to score political points openly attacking both UKIP and a charity for Heathens called The Odinist Fellowship. 

He also said:"The people of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries certainly did not think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons and would not have understood the description."The terms 'English' and 'Anglo-Saxon' were synonyms. While 'English' was first recorded as an ethnonym by Bede around 731 AD, the term 'Anglo-Saxon' came a bit later in 886 AD - but there is no reason to think that Anglisc is a term invented by Bede or that the common identity of Germanic people in Britain didn't exist before him. The fact that Jutes, Angles and Saxons all migrated in a coordinated way shows there was a tribal coalition prior even to their arrival. 

 What does he have against the English ethnic group, I wonder? It does explain the inclusion of woke artist Jade Montserrat in the paper. 

SourcesB. Foody MG, Dulias K, Justeau P, et al. Ancient genomes reveal cosmopolitan ancestry and maternal kinship patterns at post-Roman Worth Matravers, Dorset. Antiquity. Published online 2025: Sayer D, Gretzinger J, Hines J, et al. West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset. Antiquity. 2025 Gretzinger, J., Sayer, D., Justeau, P. et al. The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature 610, 112–119 (2022). Bryc K, Durand EY, Macpherson JM, Reich D, Mountain JL. The genetic ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States. Am J Hum Genet. 2015 . 

Discover the pivotal role Britain played in sparking Europe’s Bronze Age in this free history documentary! 🌟 Unearth the secrets of the Beaker folk, who mainstreamed tin-bronze in the British Isles around 2200 BC, revolutionising metallurgy with Cornwall and Devon’s rich tin deposits. Focusing on the iconic Huntshaw dagger, explore how such early bronze weapons, buried in sacred barrows, symbolised power and spirituality. 🗡️ Dive into the history of tin trade, ancient craftsmanship, and the cultural significance of Bronze Age daggers, including exclusive insights from master swordsmith Neil Burridge. 🛠️ Why were these state-of-the-art weapons buried with the dead? Watch to uncover the mysteries of Britain’s Bronze Age legacy!

Full interview with Neil Burridge sword smith 

More on the Huntshaw barrows 

 

Sources: 

-Doe, G.M. The Examination of two Barrows near Torrington.(1875) 
-Jones, Quinnell. ‘Daggers in the West: Early Bronze Age Daggers and Knives in the South-west Peninsula’. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society (2013) 
-Wang, Strekopytov, Roberts,’Copper ingots from a probable Bronze Age shipwreck off the coast of Salcombe, Devon: Composition and microstructure’ Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 97, 2018. -Williams et al. From Land's End to the Levant: did Britain's tin sources transform the Bronze Age in Europe and the Mediterranean?. Antiquity (2025)
-Hameldown dagger, Legendary Dartmoor website (2016) 

 
 

Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) joins Tom Rowsell to discuss ancient history and how the heroic ideals of the past can shape our future. This is your chance to hear BAP’s unfiltered thoughts on the classical antiquity that inspires his philosophy, from the vitality of the Bronze Age to the inspiration of the Renaissance. We also talk about Plato and religion and in the second half we also discuss the misinterpretation in population geneticists of ancient cultures and elite dominance models of cultural replacement.

Neil Burridge is an accomplished sword smith and widely considered the greatest living smith of historical replica cast bronze swords and daggers. He has cast and forged hundreds of replica blades from Ancient Greek Mycenaean, to Nordic Bronze Age and Celtic style weapons. I visited him in his workshop to collect a special replica of the Huntshaw dagger he made for me and we chatted about his work and the history of bronze working.

 

Eric Orwoll is an American Christian Platonist known for his YouTube channel. Eric's beliefs are more compatible with those of pagans than those of typical Christians are. I asked him about how a Platonic view of the One and objective good is compatible with a scientific view of evolution or a pagan view of tribal loyalty. We also discussed transhumanism and the anti-Platonist philosophies of Karl Popper and Friedrich Nietzsche.

A review of Vilhelm Grønbech's seminal work on the religion and culture of ancient Germanic peoples. Grønbech, professor of the history of religion at the University of Copenhagen, looks at Norse, Lombardic, Anglo-Saxon, Gothic and Roman sources to identify a common Teutonic culture focused on luck, honour, shame, kinship, and a unique perspective on the afterlife and the soul. My review includes favourite quotes from volume 1 of the two part book republished by Antelope Hill.

 

Pagan Finnish author ‪Aki Cederberg joins me as we discuss his latest book Holy Europe (PYHÄ EUROOPPA), published in English in 2024 by Arcana Europa. The book is a travelogue in which Aki invites the reader to join him on a spiritual exploration of the continent, looking at ancient pagan holy sites, as well as places relevant to artists and esotericists who have sought the holy within Europe in various ways. He addresses the spiritual crisis of Western man by showing how the sacred is still accessible in Europe today.