The phrase "cast back to" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It generally means to look back at something, usually in an effort to recall or reflect on it. For example, you could say "When I cast back to my childhood, I remember my holidays spent at the lake with my family."
He cast back to his previous experiences with profound grief, when their first child, John Lawrence, was stillborn and a second pregnancy ended in miscarriage.
That has a bad side: a single generation starved of knowledge, thanks to some global disaster, for example, would be cast back to the Stone Age.
When asked to explain his visions for an open border and better working conditions for migrants, the typically practical Mr. Fox turned suddenly passionate and cast back to life here in his home state.
When I cast back to an event from my past – let's say the first time I ever swam backstroke unaided in the sea – I don't just conjure up dates and times and places (what psychologists call "semantic memory").
Memories were cast back to Michael Jackson's notorious performance of Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards, and a fair contingent of viewers longed for the reappearance of Jarvis Cocker's bottom to deflate the pomposity.
Minds will be cast back to Blair's famous Chicago speech of April 1999, during the Kosovo conflict, when the former prime minister outlined what became known as the Blair doctrine of liberal interventionism.
He was casting back to the day the doctor removed my eggs.
Livo!" is the chant and you suspect a few minds are casting back to times when another left-winger would be serenaded with similar gusto.
In casting back to the early empire Tacitus did not wish necessarily to supersede his predecessors in the field, whose systematic recording he seemed to respect, judging from the use he made of their subject matter.
"Lotus Sound," by the Thai artist Montien Boonma (1953-2000), casts back to early Buddhism, when Buddha was often represented by a simple symbol, like a hand or a tree, instead of a human figure.
"I remember once doing Phoenician Women, ages ago," says Mitchell, casting back to her 1995 production of the Euripides play – a production that drew upon the then still-raging Bosnian war.
