William Comyns Beaumont (1873-1956) was a Scots journalist and author. He is frequently referred to as an eccentric and not without reason. He published an extraordinary book, Britain – The Key to World History[088], in which he claimed among other things, that Edinburgh was the original Jerusalem, London was Damascus and rather worryingly that Bristol was Sodom. In addition he was convinced that 18th Dynasty Pharaohs ruled the Welsh Britons.
In an earlier work[089] he had identified ancient Britain as Atlantis and claimed that Atlantis was destroyed by a cometary impact in 1322 BC. This book introduced Beaumont as the first British catastrophist, who expanded on this subject of celestial collisions in a subsequent book[090].
It has been claimed that Beaumont’s theory of celestial impacts partly inspired Immanuel Velikovsky’s writings[037], but characteristically, without receiving any recognition from that quarter. A list of 25 similarities between the theories of the two authors noted by Alfred De Grazia is available on the Internet(a).
In 1975 the American psychologist, Robert Stephanos, founded the Comyns Beaumont Society in Philadelphia. Stephanos appears to have totally accepted Beaumont’s ideas including their more bizarre elements.
(a) http://www.velikovsky.info/Comyns_Beaumont
