Chapter 7 focuses on Empedocles’ cosmic cycle, exploring whether and how it accommodates his doctrine of rebirth. First, through a new definition of his concept of double zoogony, the chapter opens with a reconsideration of Empedocles’ cosmic cycle as a regular alternation of two phases, Love’s Sphairos/One and Strife’s Cosmos/Many. Second, zooming in on the phase of the Cosmos and through the analysis of the metaphor of conflict in Empedocles’ cosmological narrative, the chapter investigates the origin and place of humans and gods in the world and argues that the spatial and conceptual mortal/immortal antinomy structures the action of Love and Strife in the cycle. Third, returning to the metaphor of conflict, it is argued that cosmic cycles are loaded with ethical import and that human moral agency determines the shape of our world. Finally, by showing that the moral import of the cosmic cycle seems to ground Empedocles’ religious concept of rebirth on the level of physical principles, it is shown that Empedocles’ physics does not merely accommodate, but seems in fact to be motivated by his belief in rebirth.

Empedocles (about 492–430 BCE) promoted himself as a daimon in flesh. He told a cosmic story about how daimones fell from their blessed state and the mode of their return. The pure daimon is a spherical being made up of the energy of Love. Owing to a moral fault, the individual daimon falls into flesh and enters a drawn-out cycle of moral and physical purification. The fallen daimon purifies itself by living the lives of different animals and plants and by not eating substances that contain the daimonic essence. Empedocles is historically significant for his focus on individual and present daimonification, and for his cosmic story of daimonic fall and redemption, a story moralized by Plato and his intellectual heirs.

Chapter 5 begins with similarities and differences beween Vedic and Greek sacrifice, notably the centrality to Greek sacrifice of the communal meal that was absent from Vedic sacrifice, in which the cycle of nature, the payment of metaphysical debt and the rite of passage to heaven and back each forms a cosmic cycle driven by necessity. The individualisation of the Vedic sacrifice, along with its interiorisation and automatisation, cannot be explained by ignoring the factor of monetisation. Individualisation in India and Greece has different cultural consequences.

Chapter 9 describes the earliest extant Indian beliefs about the afterlife, which were superseded by the idea of individually accumulated metaphysical merit accompanied by the danger of repeated death, which develops into the idea of subjection in the hereafter to a repeated cosmic cycle. All this prefigures the combination of individually accumulated karma with the universal cycle of reincarnation (sam?sara), from which escape was sought by various forms of renunciation. An important factor in these developments was the individual accumulation and universal circulation of money.