The Time of Origin

Yes — your intuition is very close to what Eliade is doing, but there is an important distinction between validating the structure of the myth and proving the myth literally happened. In fact, the distinction becomes especially interesting if you bring mystical experience, reincarnation research, and modern cosmology together.

1. What Eliade actually means by

illud tempus

On pp. 80–85, Eliade is not simply saying that religious people remember a historical event in the past. His claim is more radical: ritual can make the primordial event present again.

He says that the religious person wants to return to the moment when reality first came into being — the in statu nascendi, when the world was actually being created. The annual ritual does not merely remember creation; it reactualizes it.

And then comes the crucial connection to your question:

creation → return to the origin → regeneration → new birth.

Eliade explicitly says that by participating in the end and recreation of the world, a person becomes contemporary with the primordial moment and is “born anew.”

So if someone has a mystical experience in which they experience themselves as going all the way back to the beginning of creation — even experiencing something like an overwhelming “cosmic birth” — that would fit Eliade’s structure extremely well.

2. Your Big Bang example is particularly interesting

Suppose someone experiences, not merely an abstract mystical unity, but something phenomenologically like:

nothingness → primordial energy → cosmic explosion/expansion → formation of matter → life → myself

and experiences this as their own origin, rather than merely observing it.

That would be strikingly close to Eliade’s illud tempus.

The important point is that the experience would collapse the ordinary distinction between:

“the beginning of the universe”

and

“the beginning of me.”

The mystical experience says, in effect:

I was there at the beginning because the origin of the cosmos is also the origin of myself.

That is much deeper than simply believing in reincarnation.

And there is an important precedent in comparative religion. Eliade repeatedly observes that cosmic creation and human rebirth are structurally linked: immersion in primordial waters represents dissolution of the old form, followed by emergence into a new existence; initiation likewise frequently takes the form of symbolic death followed by resurrection or new birth.

So your proposed sequence is very Eliadean:

cosmic origin → return to origin → dissolution of present identity → rebirth.

3. Does comparative mythology provide evidence for this?

Yes — but evidence of a particular kind.

It gives surprisingly strong evidence that human religious experience repeatedly organizes itself around this pattern.

It does not, by itself, demonstrate that a person literally travels backward to the Big Bang or remembers a previous biological incarnation.

The strongest comparative evidence is the remarkable recurrence of four motifs:

A. Creation is the supreme sacred event

Across many traditions, the beginning of the cosmos is treated as the ultimate manifestation of sacred power.

Eliade therefore argues that every other creation — a person, house, city, kingdom, institution — tends to imitate or symbolically repeat the primordial creation.

That is why the origin possesses extraordinary power.

B. Return to the beginning produces renewal

This is probably the strongest evidence for your idea.

The pattern isn’t simply:

creation happened once.

It is:

creation → return to creation → renewal.

New Year ceremonies, agricultural renewal, initiation, coronation, healing rituals, etc., repeatedly put people symbolically back into primordial time.

A modern scholarly examination of Greek ritual found that Eliade’s basic model does indeed fit substantial portions of Greek ritual, although it needs modification: Greek rituals sometimes reproduce primordial events precisely in order to control or contain them rather than simply recreate them.

That is important because it shows that Eliade’s theory isn’t merely an arbitrary interpretation of one culture.

C. Cosmic death and personal rebirth are repeatedly equated

This is perhaps the most striking comparative finding.

Eliade identifies a recurrent structure:

destruction of form → return to undifferentiated existence → emergence of new form.

Water is one of his major examples. The flood destroys the existing world; immersion destroys the individual’s old condition; emergence produces a new condition. Baptism is therefore structurally comparable to a new creation.

Initiation has exactly the same structure:

old person dies → primordial state → new person emerges.

So the “rebirth” isn’t merely a metaphor added later. It is built into the ritual structure.

D. The phenomenon appears in mystical experience

This is where your hypothesis becomes more interesting than ordinary comparative mythology.

A myth says:

“The world was created.”

A ritual says:

“I participate in that creation again.”

A mystical experience can potentially say:

“I am experiencing the creation itself.”

That is the third level.

And that would explain why mystical traditions so often describe experiences in which ordinary autobiographical identity disappears and a much larger identity emerges.

4. But what about your “past lives” connection?

Here we have to be more careful.

There is actually some interesting empirical material here.

Ian Stevenson and subsequent researchers investigated thousands of reports of young children who spontaneously claimed memories of previous lives. The cases are particularly interesting because they are usually not produced by hypnosis; children often begin spontaneously talking about another person’s life at about ages 2–5, and some statements can subsequently be matched with facts about deceased individuals.

Some cases also include unusual behaviors, phobias, and physical characteristics that researchers have claimed correspond to the alleged previous person.

That’s genuinely interesting evidence.

But it doesn’t establish the stronger claim:

“Therefore the person experienced the Big Bang.”

Nor does it establish that reincarnation is the mechanism.

Even Stevenson acknowledged a major problem: there was no demonstrated physical mechanism explaining how personality or memory could survive death and transfer to another body.

So I would rank the evidence this way:

Claim

Evidence

Humans repeatedly imagine/reexperience primordial time

Very strong

Creation myths and rebirth myths have deep structural similarities

Very strong

Rituals deliberately recreate primordial events

Strong

Mystical experiences can produce experiences of cosmic origin/rebirth

Strong phenomenological evidence

Some children report apparently verifiable past-life information

Interesting, substantial anomalous evidence

Past-life memory proves reincarnation

Not established

Mystical experience proves consciousness existed at the Big Bang

Not established

5. There is an even more interesting possibility

I think your idea becomes strongest if we don’t immediately interpret the experience literally.

Imagine three possible interpretations of the same mystical experience:

Interpretation 1 — psychological

The brain constructs an extraordinarily powerful experience of cosmic origin.

Interpretation 2 — Eliadean

The person has entered sacred time, experiencing the primordial illud tempus rather than ordinary chronological time.

Interpretation 3 — metaphysical

Consciousness actually participates in, or somehow remembers, the primordial event from which the universe emerged.

Science currently has good grounds for accepting the cosmological history of an expanding early universe, but it cannot currently establish interpretation 2 or 3 as physical facts.

And this is where comparative mythology becomes fascinating rather than merely “proof.”

6. The really strong comparative pattern

I’d formulate the cross-cultural pattern like this:

COSMOS

Creation

↓

differentiation from primordial unity

↓

world appears

↓

life appears

↓

individual appears

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

ordinary existence

↓

dissolution of ordinary identity

↓

return to primordial unity

↓

experience of origin

↓

rebirth/new identity

RITUAL

old world

↓

chaos/death

↓

return to primordial time

↓

cosmogony repeated

↓

new world/new person

That three-way correspondence is much stronger evidence for Eliade’s theory than simply counting how many cultures have “creation myths.”

And Eliade himself makes essentially this move: the cosmos is regarded as periodically renewed, while human death and rebirth are understood through the same cosmic rhythm.

7. But there is a fascinating limitation to Eliade

Modern comparative scholarship has also shown that we shouldn’t make the pattern too universal.

The study of Greek religion I mentioned above is particularly useful because it found that Greek primordial time was ambivalent. Ritual didn’t always simply “return to paradise”; sometimes it deliberately reproduced a primordial crisis in order to contain or correct it.

So the best contemporary formulation isn’t:

“All religions believe the same thing.”

It is:

“Across remarkably different cultures, there is a recurrent relationship between origin, primordial time, death/dissolution, ritual repetition, and regeneration — but the meanings of that structure differ substantially.”

That is a much more defensible version of Eliade.

And that brings us back to your Big Bang thought.

If someone genuinely experiences the birth of the universe as the birth of themselves, I would say that is an extraordinarily good modern example of what Eliade means by reactualization of the illud tempus.

It would not prove reincarnation.

But it would raise a profound question:

Why does the human experience of radical spiritual transformation so naturally take the form of “returning to the beginning and being born again”?

And that question has a remarkably large comparative record behind it — from creation myths and New Year rites to initiation, baptism, shamanic death-and-return, mystical dissolution, and reported past-life experiences.

In fact, the next step would be to compare Eliade’s pp. 80–85 directly with Stevenson, the Upanishadic idea of Soham (“I am That”), Buddhist rebirth, shamanic “death and dismemberment,” and modern descriptions of mystical cosmic-unity experiences. That comparison could tell us whether your proposed “Big Bang → mystical return → rebirth” is merely a modern analogy or whether it really is a recurrence of a much older religious structure.