The Wheel of Birth

"For I have once already been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a mute fish leaping from the sea." —Empedocles, Purifications (DK 31 B 117)

The Greeks thought the soul comes back. This is the history of that idea — not a defense of it.

For a thousand years—from the gold tablets buried with Orphic initiates to the last Platonists of Alexandria—Greek thought held that the soul does not begin at birth and does not end at death.

This book reconstructs that history. It begins in religion: an inherited guilt, the body as tomb, and the tablets that tell the dead soul which spring to drink from. It follows the idea into philosophy with Pythagoras, who made it a way of life, and Empedocles, who sang his own past lives. It gives Plato a part of his own—six dialogues, the Myth of Er, the winged chariot, the doctrine that to learn is to remember. Then the long aftermath: Aristotle's refusal, the Stoic cosmos, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists.

It also clears the ground. Reincarnation was never Christian doctrine, and the council of 553 did not suppress it—one of the most persistent myths in the history of ideas, examined here against the sources.

Seventeen chapters, with a glossary of Greek terms, a chronology, a table of the principal sources, and a bibliographical note. A study of what the Greeks actually said: with rigor, without belief and without disdain.