The term regeneration (creation, birth "or" born again ") is found in the Stoic philosophy to indicate the rebirth of the universe after its destruction through the fire.

The conception of palingenesis originated at the Stoics from that of ‘apocatastasis’, that is reconstitution of all things created at the end of history. The concept already used in the Hellenistic literature with different meanings, was recovered from stoicism to designate the cyclical "return" or "restoration" of the cosmos after his recurring destruction.

In the philosophical and religious history, the term regeneration has assumed different meanings, in particular by designating the perpetual becoming of physical reality in Plato, the moral renewal that follows the rite of initiation as a result of the new faith in the mysteries and in St. Paul, culmination of renewal in the philosophy of Nietzsche's superman.

The concept tied to religious thought (reincarnation of the individual soul, the moral renewal of the individual after initiation), dates back to Orphism that is the expression of the soul-body duality. The orphism contrasts the image of the afterlife as a place of reward and punishment, in which those who have reached full purification benefit of mystical identification with the deity, while those who have disobeyed the ethical-religious imperative suffer the cruelest torments. Heaven and hell are thus, in the Hellenic world, creations essentially Orphic.

It is essential for orphism the conception of the body and its need for transmigration until it reaches perfection according to the rules of life made intelligible by the Orphic cult. The soul, who lived in heaven, makes a sin and falls from the kingdom of heaven on earth reincarnated in a body, which uses to pay for his crime. In death, the soul (the daimon of the Greeks) transmigrates and reassembles, not on the basis of an individual principle but on new aggregation for magnetic qualities, in another body that may not be that of a person.

Returning to the palingenesis (regeneration), in the history of religious thought the term is used in various meanings:

(1) often with quite improper use, it stands for rebirth or reincarnation. Also referred to the events of the soul after death, it does not necessarily imply a systematic theory of reincarnation; the idea of the return in a new body, of the dead among the living, is also found in primitive religions: the infant is given the name of an ancestor (mainly the grandfather) which is believed to be reborn in him;

(2) in classical and Christian antiquity, the term took on the meaning of moral renewal, regeneration of the total personality. As in the mysteries the novice undergoes a process of death and rebirth, even ritually expressed, so man can renew himself from within as a result of a new faith (in this sense the term is used by Paul of Tarsus); while on a layman can also refer to a simple reinstatement in public positions previously lost (Cicero after the exile);

(3) always in classical antiquity the term also refers to a cosmic renewal within the framework of the theory, mentioned by pre-Socratic and developed by the Stoics, of a periodic conflagration and subsequent regeneration of the Universe. In modern times this conception, inherently fought by the Christian theology, natural science and idealistic historicism, reappeared only in sporadic formulations. Among these it has to be signaled that Nietzschian one which presupposes the narrowness of the possible combinations of the cosmic elements, and then concludes with the need for their cyclical return to combinations already made.

The universe is seen by the Stoics as an ordered cosmos (as the divine principle is the Logos, ‘reason’ and then order), eternal, whose events take place during those times when birth and death, order and destruction alternate. In other words, the eternity of the world itself includes alternating of cosmic periods and takes place in a cycle that repeats itself (eternal return). To the destruction of the world, after a conflagration (ekpyrosis), it will follow a rebirth (regeneration) of the same; the terrible - in our eyes - is that everything will be reborn as before (apocatastasis)! There will be a regeneration of the world so that each man will be reborn as he was in a previous life, down to the smallest details and events!

There is also the conception according to which the soul reaches the separation from the body. In this case it gets the first degree of philosophical initiation: palingenesis. To this result are dedicating those who make philosophy truly, because the true philosophers yearn melt the soul from the body, and only by doing so "... exercise philosophy in the right way. And this is precisely the task of philosophers: dissolve and separate the soul by the body ".