Catastrophists
in Collision:
Velikovsky vs. Beaumont
by Robert
C. Stephanos
◊
In 1970, after
labouring for eight (successful) years to promote recognition of
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s work, I came upon the work of the
British catastrophist writer, Comyns Beaumont.
I was puzzled
that his name had not come to light during my many talks with
Dr. V. Nor did it appear while I was president of Cosmos and
Chronos: Study Groups for Interdisciplinary Science, a
Velikovskian campus-oriented effort. Nor did it show up in the
many activities and debates on V’s behalf.
It wasn’t
until I was cast free of the Velikovskians, and pursued my own
studies of catastrophism, that I accidentally came upon The
Riddle of the Earth, the first of Beaumont’s five books of a
new catastrophism.
Its title was
the attraction, but its contents proved to be even more
magnetic. The book is written in the form of theses (over 100 of
them), summarizing his thoughts on cometary catastrophe. Written
in 1925, it read like the 1950s bombshell Worlds in
Collision.
One of
Beaumont’s central propositions took my fancy – that geography
had been falsified in the fourth century, and the Old Testament
holy city, Jerusalem, was really Edinburgh, Scotland. This
falsification was a deception promulgated by Constantine the
Great in 325 AD, at the Church Council of Nicea. The Church then
carried on a conspiracy to protect the deception in order to
guarantee its dictatorial rule over the Empire, and built a new
city of Jerusalem in the Mediterranean.
The Role of
Saturn
Another
shocker for me was the role Beaumont assigned to the planet
Saturn, as the key to world history. Thoroughly intrigued, I
searched for the true and the false in his basic ideas.
Beaumont’s
books, unlike V’s, however, were long relegated to library
morgues, and it took much persistence to acquire them. After
considerable transatlantic correspondence and telephoning, I
located one of Beaumont’s daughters and a real treasure trove of
information – an unpublished manuscript that Beaumont completed
before his death…Beaumont was ahead of his time – and ahead of
Velikovsky – with his provocative conclusions and his unorthodox
views on history. According to Beaumont, a large comet
threatened Earth in the 14th century (1322 BC). Its
debris (meteorites) caused a cosmic catastrophe that devastated
early civilization, then centred in the Atlantis of antiquity –
the British Isles.
Plato’s story
of Atlantis, and the Biblical account of the flood of Noah, were
special attempts to record this disaster. The catastrophe so
shattered the cradle of humankind’s earliest civilization that
it immutably altered the religious beliefs of its survivors, who
fled to the global Atlantean colonies in sunnier climes,
themselves to become nations.
Beaumont was
an improbable heretic. In the years before and after WWI, he was
a top-flight journalist, editor, and publisher on London’s famed
Fleet Street, dealing primarily with politics, the arts and
society. he was well connected in these fields due to his early
work as assistant to publisher-diplomat James Gordon Bennett. As
private secretary to America’s U.S. Ambassador to Germany, John
G. A. Leishman, he traveled to many countries, acquainted
himself with their customs and histories.
He was
confident and brother-in-law to the British playwright and
theatrical producer Gerald Du Maurier. Beaumont was the first to
recognize and publish the fiction of his talented niece, Daphne
Du Maurier.
A consummate
establishment insider, Beaumont passionately pursued a parallel
maverick career, developing ideas that challenged orthodoxy
without relying on any of the divine intervention that is the
backbone of contemporary Creationism and Biblical catastrophism.
His ideas challenge accepted views of ancient history, its
chronology, and its geography.
The Effects
of Comets
The crux of
Beaumont’s schema is that the history of our planet, and the
solar system within which it exists, is largely the product of
cometary intrusions and their effects. Its social life
(civilization) arose with the Celts in the north, especially in
the British Isles and Scandinavia – the Atlantis of myth.
Although there
was no actual sinking of Atlantis – Britain, some of its western
areas were permanently submerged and the island was ravaged by
electromagnetic waves of cosmic energy, exploding volcanoes,
earthquakes, hurricane storms, and tidal waves. As a result of
the catastrophe, the temperature dropped. Beaumont identifies
the main agent of this historical event as the planet Saturn
(Zeus-Chronos) becoming a comet, in myth, the serpent of the
sky, and Phaeton, the terror of the skies. Its ravaged body
produced a son, a new planet = a new sky god, Jupiter (a new
Zeus), to rule a renewed Earth.
Beaumont
Predates Velikovsky
Those familiar
with the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky might well lock onto
certain key features in Beaumont’s corpus and conclude, perhaps
with a dismissive yawn, “Oh, Beaumont agrees with Velikovsky.”
But “agrees with” is hardly the case.
Note that
Beaumont’s primary work in catastrophism, although under the
pseudonym Appian Way, was published in 1925. He used his own
name in 1932 on his second book, the keystone to his
catastrophist theories. The book’s contents are aptly summed up
by its subtitle: “The Origin, Building Up and Destruction of
Worlds by Means of Cometary Contacts.”
By the end of
WWII (he was then in his 70s), Beaumont’s journalism career was
over and he began work on distilling his theories of
catastrophism and even more revolutionary conclusions about
history and geography.
Beaumont’s
next to books, the first and second volumes of his trilogy,
followed rapidly (1946, 1949). Neither were commercial
successes. Beaumont completed the third volume before his death
in 1953.
Again note
that all but the last of these books were published before V’s
Worlds in Collision made its impact on this side of the
Atlantic in 1950.
In the years I
was closely associated with V (roughly 1961-1969), he never
mentioned Beaumont or gave him so much as a credit in a footnote
in any of his books.
The
similarities between Beaumont and Velikovsky are too strong to
be coincidental. It is Saturn’s role in earliest history that
provides Beaumont a “smoking gun” for this judgment.
Velikovsky
Knew of Beaumont
There are,
however, a number of cases of parallel development of ideas on
record. Perhaps the most famous is that involving Charles Darwin
and Alfred Russell Wallace, who both independently developed the
main features of what has become known as the Theory of
Evolution in the nineteenth century.
It therefore
came as a shock when I finally discovered that V did indeed know
of Beaumont’s earlier work. The disclosure came with the
publication of Cosmic Heretics by Alfred deGrazia in
1984.
DeGrazia was
long one of V’s closest collaborators and friends, and a
continuing acquaintance and correspondent of mine dating from my
own contact with V.
In his book,
deGrazia wrote:
Too
many of Beaumont’s conclusions are the same to explain them
as sheer coincidence…A note exists in his archive,
mentioning having read Beaumont’s 1932 book (The Mysterious
Comet); the note dismisses the work. Yet V expresses his
wonder whether Beaumont had gotten his (V’s) ideas by
telepathy.
DeGrazia tries
to ameliorate the situation with a tenuous explanation:
During
the 1940s, V met with the (Beaumont) books at Columbia
University Library where he spend thousands of hours in
research on his own books. The Columbia University Library
possessed of Beaumont’s relevant works only The Riddle of
Prehistoric Britain which was published in 1946. By this
time Worlds in Collision had been written.
DeGrazia also
wrote:
Velikovsky never mentioned or cited Beaumont. Could
Velikovsky have read and forgotten Beaumont’s books? His
method of proof is entirely different; practically
everything – style, format, language, method, and evidence –
is different, only conclusions are the same.
DeGrazia’s
candor in revealing the link is admirable, but his apologetics
leave a lot to be desired in terms of credibility. Telepathy? I
wonder if that happy thought crossed Darwin’s mind. Forgotten?
Everyone who knew V, deGrazia included, has attested that V had
a remarkable memory.
What about the
claim that V’s research haunt, the Columbia University Library,
contained only Beaumont’s 1946 book, and that the manuscript for
Worlds in Collusion was already complete at that time.
Even deGrazia
admits that there was a note that V had read Beaumont’s seminal
1932 book. And V was well known as the last-minute tinkered with
his manuscripts.
Plagiarism
and Predecessors
I am not
claiming there is actual plagiarism involved, other than
influence and interplay of ideas. (Advocates of cometary
catastrophe in historic times all owe a dept to earlier pioneers
such Ignatius Donnelly and William Whiston.)
Let us also
admit that, like many from academia, V had an elitist mindset,
hindering him from appreciating the work of the amateur. Enough
here, at least, to withhold credit and precedence.
This much is
certain. Beaumont’s ideas on the importance of comets in
humankind’s history were in print before Velikovsky’s – although
in a foreign country and without achieving the temporary popular
success that was to be Velikovsky’s. Especially apparent, thanks
to deGrazia’s revelations, is that V was aware of Beaumont’s
work.
V’s belief in
his own originality was so firmly rooted that he speculated that
telepathy was enabling Beaumont to rush into print – by decades
in some cases.
There is an
even more intriguing possible reason for V’s failure to
acknowledge the existence of Beaumont. This is not the
similarities but the many dissimilarities between the writers.
Why call attention to a contemporary (until his death in 1953)
who not only precedes you in areas of agreement but disagrees
with you on many other points? But that is speculation.
What is clear
is that forty years after his death, Beaumont deserves a wider
audience in an era when fresh evidence for catastrophism is
steadily accumulating.
An important
element of Beaumont’s work that will endure and serve to remind
us is that the pursuit of knowledge is not the exclusive of the
expert. The amateur can contribute significantly to that
pursuit.
For the last
twenty years I have accumulated evidence to support Beaumont’s
perspective of ancient history as truer than the consensus
version or Velikovsky’s.
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(Article in Fate Magazine, March 1994)
