When new life stirs within the womb, and a mother has the sensation of her baby moving within her for the first time, it's called "quickening." The same word is associated with pilgrims, who go to sacred places to "quicken" the divinity within themselves, to experience spiritual awakening or receive a blessing or become healed. The seeker embarks on a journey with a receptive soul and hopes to find divinity there. And, as I began to appreciate from my tuning-fork response to Chartres, pilgrimage to a sacred place is an in-the-body spiritual experience — as were my pregnancies.
It is believed that the divine spirit is incarnate at sacred places, both in the sense that the Deity is present there and in that these are places where the divinity penetrates matter, impregnating or quickening the divine in the pilgrim. In Europe, places of Christian pilgrimage are nearly always sites that had been sacred to the Great Goddess before the advent of Christianity.
— Jean Shinoda Bolen, Crossing to Avalon