The experience of time as cyclical — rather than linear — has been the dominant human understanding for most of history. This cyclical framework provides the metaphysical context within which reincarnation and karma are not merely beliefs but expressions of the very structure of reality.

The Myth of the Eternal Return

Mircea Eliade’s seminal work The Myth of the Eternal Return (also titled Cosmos and History) examines the archaic ontology that underlies traditional societies. For archaic humanity:

  • Reality is constituted through the repetition of archetypal acts first performed by gods, heroes, or ancestors in a primordial time (in illo tempore).
  • An object or action becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats a celestial archetype.
  • Time is periodically regenerated through rituals of renewal — the New Year, the restoration of the cosmos.
  • History — the linear, irreversible sequence of events — is seen as a fall from the paradigmatic reality of eternal patterns.

This worldview directly bears on reincarnation: if time is cyclical, then the soul’s journey through multiple lives is not a linear progression but a participation in the eternal rhythm of creation, destruction, and renewal.

The Sacred and the Profane

In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade distinguishes between two modes of being in the world:

  • Sacred time — The eternal, repeatable time of myth and ritual, in which the events of primordial times become present again.
  • Profane time — The ordinary, linear, historical time of everyday existence.

The soul’s journey across lives can be understood as the interplay of sacred and profane time — death as a return to the sacred source, rebirth as a new entry into profane duration.

The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces identifies a universal pattern (the monomyth) across world mythologies: the hero’s departure from the ordinary world, initiation through trials, and return with transformative knowledge. This pattern reflects the soul’s journey: descent into embodiment, the trials of life, and the return to the source — a cycle that reincarnation extends across multiple lifetimes.

Campbell’s work shows how the archetype of death and rebirth operates at the level of both individual psychology and cosmic mythology, providing a framework for understanding reincarnation as a universal human intuition.

Time and Eternity

Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Time and Eternity examines the philosophical distinction between temporality and eternity across Greek, Indian, and Christian traditions. He argues that authentic eternity is not endless duration but a timeless present that encompasses all duration — a conception that fundamentally reframes the meaning of reincarnation. If the soul is eternal, its multiple births are not sequential events in linear time but expressions of an eternal reality.

François Jullien and Chinese Thought

Jullien’s The Propensity of Things explores the Chinese concept of shi (勢) — the propensity or configuration of things — which offers an alternative to Western and Indian causal frameworks. In Chinese thought, change operates not through karmic causality but through the inherent tendency of situations to transform. While not directly about reincarnation, Jullien’s work broadens the comparative framework for thinking about causation, time, and transformation across cultures.