I was intrigued by Derel Brierley’s article, especially with regard to a supposed northern location of Atland (Atlantis?). Brierley relates that
the Oera Linda Book places Atland as ‘stretching out far to the west of Jutland’. Robert Scrutton’s The Other Atlantis shows it as ‘a huge
island off Norway’s coast’, and John Grant’s A Directory of Discarded Ideas places it, erroneously according to Brierley, ‘between the north
of Britain and Greenland’. Zeno’s ‘Map of the North’, in Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, shows an island, Frisland, in a similar
position north west of Scotland.
May I bring to the attention of SIS members a little known book, Comyns Beaumont’s The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain (published by Rider
& Co, 1946)? The thrust of this volume, which merits a close study, is that ‘it envisages an entirely new outlook on the past history of the
world in which the British Isles emerge as the predominant influence’. Beaumont believed that ‘the Atlantic and not the Mediterranean was
the focus of world civilization’ and that ‘the British Isles, with the Scandinavian Peninsula – originally itself an island – emerged from
obscurity as the true motherland of the Aryan or Nordic race, the biblical Adamites, and dominated the ancient world long before the Flood
of Noah’. Beaumont believed the focus to be the Atlantis of legend.
‘The day arrived when this civilization collapsed …. It was what we call the Flood of Noah …. This prodigious event was by no means local
and inundation was only one of its tremendous legacies to future generations. It approached earth from the celestial north-east and flung itself
upon an unhappy world … Its epicentre lay in Scandinavia and the British Isles, commemorated since by many an epic and legend placed
geographically altogether wrongly by historians and theologians, … It obliterated many landmarks and elevated others. It permanently
affected the world’s climate towards greater extremes of cold and damp, lengthened the solar year by enlarging the world’s orbit … It was the
drowning of Atlantis.’
‘The Flood immortalizes the collision of a fallen planet, later termed Satan, actually a cometary body, with our Earth.’
Much of Beaumont’s book is an attempt to identify ancient writings with physical features of the British Isles, especially the north west of
Scotland. Largely forgotten, is it about time that we took another objective look at Beaumont’s ideas?