Henry Corbin as Knight of the Temple

The topic of this chapter is Corbin’s involvement in esoteric neo-Templar Orders and Freemasonry during the final decade of his life, and its relevance to his major lecture “The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms,” presented at Eranos in 1974. It is not very widely known that Corbin became a Freemason during the 1970s, practicing a specific Christian-chivalric system originally created by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz and known as the Rite Écossais Rectifié. This background is essential for understanding the Université Saint-Jean de Jérusalem and its relation to esoteric and occultist milieus and traditions concerned with an “inner church” of the spirit, a universal Temple accessible only in the mundus imaginalis, and an esoteric knighthood active behind the scenes of “profane history.”