Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism

Mattias Gardell's Gods of the Blood, The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, published by Duke University Press in 2003, is an academic study of the modern Germanic pagan revival's overlap with white separatist movements, and it names Stephen Flowers, writing as Edred Thorsson, as the founder of the Rune Gild in Austin, Texas in 1979 and as a key figure in the broader Asatru revival. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Gardell's own direct research, including interviews, within these movements. Its strength is documenting a genuinely uncomfortable overlap within modern paganism with scholarly rigor rather than either sensationalizing it or looking away from it. Its limit is that it focuses specifically on the racialist and separatist strand of the pagan revival, so a claim about the broader, non-racialist mainstream of modern Heathenry needs a source focused on that wider movement instead.