Ignaz von Dollinger wrote:”If I were asked to name the _dies nefastus_ in the history of the world, the day that would come to my mind would be none other than October 13th, 1307.”
(the day when Philip the Fair ordered the arrest of the French Templars). (cited in
Pierre Mariel:Guide…des Templiers. Table Ronde, Paris, 1973.
A few pages further on, the same work makes mention of “a legend whose setting is the amphitheatre of
Gavarnie in the Pyrenees, where six knights of the Temple lie at rest in a chapel.
Every year, on March 18 – the birthday of the last Grand Master of the Order (Jacques de Molay) –
a Knight of the Temple is seen to appear, whose shroud is replaced by the famous white cloak with the four triangled red cross. He is in battle apparel and holds his lance in rest. He walks slowly towards the centre of the Chapel and utters a piercing call, which re-echoes
around the ampitheatre of the mountains:”Who will defend the Holy Temple? Who will deliver the tomb of Christ?” At his call the six entomed Templars come alive and stand up, to answer three times:
“No one! No one! No one! The Temple is destroyed!”
…echoing the lamentations of the Talmudic Sages, each of them sets the same catastrophe at the centre
of world history: The destruction of the Temple, the same Temple.
Occuring and recurring – opposing this dispair with the tenacity of permanent defiance: the image of the rebuilding of the Temple, the coming of the New Temple, which assumes the dimensions of Cosmic Restoration.(pp263).
Henri Corbin,The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms
Paris, July 25th 1974.
Published in Henry Corbin:Temple and Contemplation.Islamic Publications Ltd. Routledge&Kegan,London,1986.