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.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that Empedocles’ concept of rebirth can be reconciled within his physical system. In this regard I first show that, by drawing on the imaginary of metamorphosis tales, Empedocles conceptualizes rebirths as changes of forms that are analogous to those transformations the elements undergo when mixed in mortal bodies. Second, Empedocles’ concept of rebirth entails personal survival upon the death of the body and, indeed, upon several deaths. Third, although claims to personal survival are thought not to fit with Empedocles’ considerations on psychological and mental functions, and for this reason scholars generally do not consider rebirth as a positive, physical doctrine, here I suggest a different explanation. My argument is that the way in which Empedocles conceived of rebirth as a change of forms led him to marginalize the soul; that is, to fail a reflection on the relationship between personal survival and the self, and the role of the soul in it. Yet he had a traditional, Homeric concept of soul that can not only sustain the idea of disembodied existence, as it stands for personal survival upon death; it can also be adapted to the principles of his physics.

By first providing a summary of the main arguments in each chapter and then highlighting the ways, elaborated in this study, in which Empedocles’ physics is consistent with his religious interests in rebirth and purification, Chapter 8 sets out the main conclusion of this book, namely that rebirth and purification are an integral part of Empedocles’ physical system; indeed, that rebirth seems to be a premise of some of his physical principles and theories. In doing so, in addition to a new textual reconstruction of the proem of the physical poem, this book offers new insights into pivotal concepts and much debated issues of Empedocles’ thought, such as the conceptualization of rebirth and the notions of daimon, soul and personal survival, the purpose and role of physical doctrine for release from rebirth, the reconstruction of the cosmic cycle and the analysis of its moral significance. Finally, it is emphasized that this novel reconstruction of Empedocles’ thought, together with the book’s methodological standard, can provide a key to approaching and re-evaluating the character and aims of the thought of other early thinkers and of fifth-century natural philosophy in general.

Aiming at reconstructing the prologue to On Nature, the first part of this chapter focuses on the collocation of the demonological fragments which, by expanding on Empedocles’ exile introduced in B 115, depict his katabasis into the realm of the dead. The narrative of this extraordinary journey serves Empedocles as authorial legitimation on matters beyond ordinary human knowledge. The second part of Chapter 2 reconstructs the rest of the proem by interweaving traditionally introductory themes, such as the dedication to Pausanias and the invocation to the Muse, with novel topics concerning the rejection of ritual sacrifice based on Empedocles’ concept of rebirth. The proem thus reconstructed presents a coherent programmatic structure and makes sense of several Empedoclean fragments that are essential for a comprehensive and impartial understanding of his thought. Moreover, by showing that religious concerns inform the entire introductory section, the new proem indicates that the concept of rebirth is central to Empedocles’ physical system and thus offers a new basis to rethink the interplay of myth, religion, and physics in his natural philosophy.

Chapter 3 focuses on δαίμων and its significance in Empedocles’ concept of rebirth. I show that the demonological fragments and the term δαίμων, in particular, emphasize Empedocles’ divine nature in contrast to the rest of humankind and cannot represent, as is generally believed, the place where his personal vicissitude becomes exemplary of every soul’s destiny, thus grounding his doctrine of rebirth. To define what Empedocles intended when he called himself a reincarnated δαίμων, I analyze Plato’s myths of the soul’s otherworldly journeys and some fragments attesting to Pythagoras’ demonology. While Plato, in his concept of rebirth, conceptualized the δαίμονες as deities who guide souls during and beyond this life, Pythagoras articulated the idea that a god could exceptionally undergo rebirths, but these are usually reserved for ordinary souls. Following Pythagoras and anticipating Plato, Empedocles constructs his demonology which is linked, but does not overlap, with his doctrine of rebirth. Finally, addressing the issue of the ‘physical’ δαίμων in B 59 I argue that δαίμων is a predicative notion which, in all Empedoclean occurrences, is still intimately connected to the traditional sense of ‘god’.

This chapter rehearses the religious and philosophical background against which the Buddha’s ideas on kamma, samsara, and rebirth were formulated. It also argues that the Buddha’s ideas should be understood within the broader context of his meditative practices and his most basic insight that who we are and what we think exists is a function of our mind, its cognitive or intellectual powers, and the actions that we will or intend.

This chapter is concerned with the logical relationships among interdependent arising, impermanence, emptiness, anatta, dukkha, kamma, rebirth, mindfulness, moksa, and Nibbana.

From conception and lived experience, we proceed to death in Chapter 4. Although my focus is on Lucretius’ treatment of death and men’s fears of it, in “The Hole that Gapes for All” I persist with analyzing the themes of wombs, semen, fecundity and the ways by which Lucretius weaves this imagery into his criticism of human appetite for consumables, sex, and protracted life. In Lucretius’ poetics, the universe, the world, and individual human bodies all become sites of decomposition, insemination, and (re)birth. Death itself is shown to be pathologically eroticized as the final object of a man’s fear and lust – a desire Lucretius seeks to reform into an ethical acceptance of death. Lucretius’ point, I argue, is that, regardless of biological maleness and the security it bestows on Roman men, nature’s laws make wombs and tombs of them all in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth.

Spiritual training in the Way of Hermes was supposed to culminate in an experience of radical transformation known as rebirth (palingenesis). This process involved a state of mania (divine madness) and an exorcism of daimonic entities, and is analyzed in detail with reference to Corpus Hermeticum XIII.

The three sections of Chapter 7 explore (1) the collapse of the birth and death contraries; (2) the rebirth topos; and (3) the Buddhist doctrine of the unborn. The first section concentrates on A Piece of Monologue of the late 1970s, noting its allusions to cycles of rebirth and scenes of wall gazing and repeated evocations of a ‘beyond’ resonating with Schopenhauerian will-lessness and Buddhist scriptures. In the second section, probing the drama of rebirth throughout Beckett’s writings, allusions to a Schopenhauerian hellish existence are linked to parallels between Dantean and Buddhist conceptions of hell and purgatory. In contrast, Ill Seen Ill Said’s last pages are seen to allude to an end to rebirth in a coming home to the void via detachment from illusion. This chapter’s third and longest section concerns the convergence of the Beckettian theme of unbornness with the Buddhist doctrine of an original and immanent state of mind beyond birth and death.

The second chapter explores in more detail the Buddhist concepts relayed by Schopenhauer cycling through Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the Beckett of the 1930s and writers and artists with whom he was conversant, the chapter chronicles what their works owe to the Buddha and Schopenhauer’s teachings. Subsequent sections probe the analogies that are evident for Schopenhauer between Eastern and Western mysticism – the Buddha and Meister Eckhart’s teachings in particular – resulting in Beckett’s allusions throughout his oeuvre, over six decades, to both Buddhist and Christian Neoplatonic thought. The Buddha and Schopenhauer’s two-world view of the empirical and the metaphysical serves to interrogate nihilistic interpretations of the Buddhist absolute and to focus closely on Schopenhauer’s rescue of nirvāṇa from such misreadings. A short disquisition on the unknowable and silence, values Beckett shared with Eastern and Western thinkers, concludes this chapter.

“Jesus and the Gender of Blood.” Here’s a place blood seeps in where it hardly seems to belong: Crucifixion kills not by blood loss but suffocation. Neither crucifixion nor a common meal requires blood. Hands and feet can be lashed without nails. Why must Jesus bleed? Gospel writers portray Jesus at the Last Supper as mobilizing the language of blood to transform a structure of violent oppression – crucifixion – into a peaceful feast. The image of the Woman with a Flow of Blood, read as dysmenorrhea, recognizes a kinship: three gospels identify both the woman and Jesus with their bleeding, as leaky. The stories feminize Jesus by turning his blood away from male-gendered violence and toward female-gendered purposes of new life and rebirth. Reflections on the Eucharist and taboo.

Using Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, chapter 3 describes “immortality projects” that are commonly used to avoid the terror of death. Immortality projects are activities that we humans regard as endowing cosmic significance and eternal life on us, including both publicly recognized projects and everyday, quotidian undertakings. None of these “one-dimensional” immortality projects work, Becker states. We die despite our efforts to cast ourselves as immortal. The terror of death, however, is so great that we lie to ourselves about the ineffectiveness of our immortality projects. Becker says that these lies are “vital,” given that death with extinction is so terrifying. It is terrifying because we humans desperately need to believe that our lives have lasting meaning. The only true way to deal with the prospect of death, Becker states, is to “die” and be “reborn” by identifying with what he calls “the transcendent.” Chapter 3 describes what is involved in this rebirth.