Facets of a Diamond - Blog

Photograph by John Diamond, M.D.

To quicken: to give life, to vivify.

The anthropologist Margaret Murray at the age of ninety-nine declared in her book The Genesis of Religion that the origin of the religious feeling occurred long, long ago when a woman first felt the mysterious quickening and attributed it to an unseen Power.

“Primeval Woman,… being unaware of the role of the male, would regard [the quickening] as the actual beginning of the whole process which culminates in the birth of the child…[W]ithout her knowledge or consent, some Power had placed a living being within her body.”*

The quickening: the awareness of the Spirit within.

Music quickens me, and dancing, and painting, and photographing: the Spirit within me – and everywhere.

* London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, pp. 66-67.