There is a passage in Megillah 29a that speaks with a simple and inexhaustible voice. It says that, when Israel went into exile, the Shekhinah went with them. The Presence did not remain aloof in heaven, untouched by grief. She descended, clothed herself in the dust of Babylon, and remained beside her children. Few lines are more daring. They present the Divine not as a monarch who abandons the condemned, but as a Mother who follows her own into captivity. This vision touches the heart of Marian devotion, where the Virgin is seen at the Cross, silent yet inseparable from the pain of the Son. To meditate on this truth is to recognise that the divine Presence never leaves, even when the world appears a prison.
I. The Exiled Presence
The rabbis who shaped the midrash spoke from the memory of destruction. They had seen Jerusalem fall, they had seen the Temple burn. Their audacity was to claim that holiness did not end there. If the people were carried to Babylon, then the Shekhinah walked with them. The Divine Presence does not stay fixed in stone, nor confined to a sanctuary; she moves with the broken. The image is maternal. The child wanders, the mother follows. It is the same spirit that Christians later perceived in Mary beneath the Cross. She avoids speaking many words; she simply remains. The Marian icon of the Pietà is already implicit in the rabbinic imagination of the Shekhinah bending over her scattered people. The tie is fidelity in suffering.
This is more than consolation. It reveals that exile is also theatre of Divine compassion. The Shekhinah descends into the very place that feels most devoid of God. This paradox is the seed of gnosis. When the holy hides in the profane, when the Mother is found in Babylon, then the eye begins to pierce the veil. The Presence in exile becomes more intimate, because She is discovered in the place of absence.
II. The Marian Bridge
The Christian tradition placed Mary at the foot of the Cross, a silent witness whose presence is itself revelation. She is the Shekhinah transposed into flesh, the Divine compassion dwelling with the condemned. The line from Babylon to Calvary is straight. In both, the Mother goes down with her children. This is why Marian devotion has always carried a subterranean strength. She is not only the exalted Queen; she is the hidden companion of exile, the one who never leaves.
The Megillah passage resonates with the Marian mysteries in another way. The Shekhinah goes into exile to carry hidden sparks. The Virgin receives into her womb the Word that will redeem. In both cases the feminine becomes vessel of repair. The exile is the stage where the fire of restoration is kindled. The Marian image reveals this fire as incarnate love. In her, the Presence is flesh, milk, tear, and sword.
The mystics knew that this descent of the feminine is also revelation of the abyss. The Shekhinah in exile is a veil torn. Mary at the Cross is a heart pierced. Both are gates into the vision of the world as it really is: a field where absence and presence embrace. To see this is to feel the abysm open, yet not as terror, but as promise of union.
III. The Chariot and the Abysm
The Chariot in Tarot is tied with the sign of Cancer, the house of the Moon, the place of maternal waters. It is also the eighteenth path on the Tree of Life, the line that unites Geburah with Binah. To contemplate this card is to stand before the abysm where the veil is crossed. The Charioteer rides forward, but his power comes from the union of opposites beneath him.
This belongs to the same current as Megillah 29a. The Presence goes into exile; the Mother enters the realm of severity; the veil is torn and the abysm glimpsed. The Chariot teaches that such descent is also ascent. The rider advances not by avoiding the abyss, but by crossing it. The Shekhinah in Babylon, Mary at the Cross, the soul before the Chariot point to the same mystery: the Divine shares the prison with the prisoners. In this sharing lies the secret of liberation.
The Moon now at the end of Cancer, waning and balsamic, confirms the same truth. When the luminary approaches dissolution, the Presence turns inward, becoming more hidden, more intimate. The veil is thinnest at the moment of apparent loss. The Chariot crosses, the Mother remains, and the Shekhinah descends. And, in that paradox, the imprisoned heart discovers freedom.
Fiat Lux.