Rating: 
Summary: A Must-Read For Everyone!
Review: This wonderful book has been a part of my ever-growing library of women's issues and studies books for over 2 years. I return to it again and again for the "original" meanings of words that today have been masculinized beyond imagining! It reveals what most women secretly have known about our patriarchal culture - how it distorts, demeans and belittles a woman's life and all the issues she deals with day in and day out. Every woman should have this book in their homes to read and share with their husbands, boyfriends, daughters and sons. And if you can afford it, buy a copy for your best friend, too! It will change their lives - literally, and for the better.
Rating:
Summary: prepare to get passionate!
Review: whatever shreds of Christianity there may have been lingering in my heart have been firmly but irrevocably squished. Nothing could have prepared me for the revelation that the literal translation of "Jehovah" is "I Woman". Or that the Catholic church mudered more people than the Nazis during the Inquisition. Learning that the shamrock, the Fleur-de-Lis,the lotus, the rose, the cowrie shell, and the Holy Grail are all symbols of the female sexual organs made me smile not just with humour,but with the realization that the current atmoshere of political and sexual misogyny was not always the status quo. The tone is occasionally bitchy, but never less than entertaining, and always illuminating. The entries under "War", "Sex", "Marriage", "Prostitution",and "Hell" warrant a book all their own. If this book does not make you angry, make you cry, and grin, and wonder, and yearn to learn more, you are reading the book upside down!
Rating:
Summary: This book will change your life!
Review: I'm not the only person who believes Barbara G. Walker's Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets deserves a "five-star" rating! In England it won "Book of the Year" awards. It takes a courageous view of what our ancient ancestors may have thought before theocratic authorities branded their (and thus our) brains with their learned, infallible views. No doubt its current Amazon Book rating of "three-stars" (I was astounded) is based on prejudice, for the work will be more-than-controversial to anyone who has been brought up in a patriarchal society (that would be all of us) ... it certainly will be rejected wholesale by anyone who holds to a worldview based on the authority of The Bible. Ms. Walker makes the radical assumption that history began before the time of The Greeks, and, through careful footnoting and extensive notes, she formulates a consistent theory of ancient philosophical trends. And it's fun to read, even should one simply open its pages randomly. No index is available, but the alphabetical organization of the headings make it easy for one to find the name of any goddess a good pagan could imagine, though some god-names have been studiously avoided, perhaps in deference to the title's obviously feminine gender-focus. And though many of Walker's statements will be diametrically opposed to our long-accepted philosophies [under the heading for MAN, for example, she claims it originally was a word meaning WOMAN] her treatment is consistent and thorough. I challenge anyone to open this book - to any page - and not be astounded by some idea that had never before occurred to them. This is one astounding work; but I have no doubt that American schools will burn it rather than allow our children to read such sacrilege. Bravo, Ms. Walker! Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: All the answers
Review: This book covers as many topics as possible for short but concise answers to questions both common and arcane. This is not a feminist tirade; it is fact. This a must read for all women, if only to understand why their lives have been defined as they are in the seemingly modern world.
Rating: 
Summary: Not entirely accurate but can't be dismissed as well...
Review: Walker does distort some fact and sometimes she doesn't write with complete accuracy. She has some far fetched ideas but I consider them good. Why, you may ask, I consider far fetched, inaccutare ideas good? Because they are different than what we are used to hearing and because they question the status quo. This book makes you think and even for some gives them a push to follow her sources and dig up more information. An accurate scholarly book is a treasure. But I believe that a controversial book that makes you search deep to find out information on your own and actually think is a bigger treasure because it challanges you. Take this book with a grain of salt but don't dismiss it entirely. The book does have its highlights and while you try to decifer what is good and what is not you will learn more than you ever bargained for.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent... as a doorstop
Review: I was very excited when I first bought this book years ago. As a naive grad student I thought I had found a treasure chest of information, but I quickly found out that I was very wrong. There is a lot of information in there, but most of it is simply not verifiable. This should be taken the same way as The Golden Bough by Frazer. As it is quite a large book, the least one could do is recycle it and use it for a doorstop! There are several other reviews here with examples, so I'll refer you to those.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent... as a doorstop
Review: I was very excited when I first bought this book years ago. As a naive grad student I thought I had found a treasure chest of information, but I quickly found out that I was very wrong. There is a lot of information in there, but most of it is simply not verifiable. This should be taken the same way as The Golden Bough by Frazer. As it is quite a large book, the least one could do is recycle it and use it for a doorstop! There are several other reviews here with examples, so I'll refer you to those.
Rating:
Summary: All the answers
Review: One woman's anti-male fantasy passed off as scholarship. I'd list my problems with it, but the dozens of examples below should be enough to convince even the most casual reader that this is a book for the serious student of history to avoid. The inaccuracies are numerous and the bias obvious. It is disturbing to consider that a virtual work of fiction with about as much veracity as Harry Potter could find its way into colleges and high schools.
Rating:
Summary: Not at all accurate...
Review: Barbara Walker has an obvious bias against all things male and/or Christian. She rewrites myth and history to make everything female-supreme, Goddess centric, anti-male, and full of sexual womyn power. Now, before someone dismisses me as 'obviously anti-female and deluded by patriarchy' or some such, I should state that I am a female neo-pagan with no love for the Church and/or the views it supports towards women. That said - I don't like made up or revisionist history, even if it does stroke the ego a bit. She bases everything on the supposed Pre-historical Matriarchy - which has little to no archeological evidence to truly support in the grand scale she portrays it. But besides that, her Encyclopedia and Dictionary are a mish-mash of cultural hodge-podge! She acts as if gods and goddesses from varying cultures are generally interchangeable, offering nothing for the cultural differences which give birth to their own representations of deity. She has butchered myths, made up "alternate versions" which have no founding anywhere except her own imagination, ignored important details of myths which don't mesh with her agenda, and basically perverted the symbols she pretends to represent. Bad scholarship is bad enough... but her fabrications and invented history and myths are just a disgrace to the pagan community, and, in my opinion, an insult to women and to the goddess and gods which exist without the clap-trap found in this book. It does not present women as strong and/or empowered to rely on revisiont psuedo-history, no matter how good it may sound. There are many strong female figures out there... many strong goddesses of all ilks. This book does not do them justice.
Rating:
Summary: More fantasy than fact
Review: There are a lot of people who want to believe this book is an accurate source of information about mythology and history. Wishing does not make it so. Some of the reviewers claim that the only reason people say bad things about it is that they are trying to defend Christianity and are closed-minded because of their faith. I am an atheist and mythology scholar who has no faith to defend, and I still think this book is pure nonsense. It appears to me that Walker's supporters are the ones doing it out of faith and dogma and refusing to face facts.
As others have pointed out, all you need to do is follow her footnotes. It may look impressive when she makes three statements in a paragraph and cites three references to back her up, but it's a lot less impressive when you actually have those books and they don't say at all what she claims they do. I've done it (I have a large library of mythology books), but so can you. Go to a library and pick a few to look up. You'll probably be shocked at the differences in what she claims those sources say and what they really do. The only ones that I have found so far that seem to be at all similar are a handful of others also in the neo-pagan movement (Graves, Stone and Gimbutas being the main three).
Here is just the highlights of a few of many errors in just one entry:
"Mara
Exceedingly ancient name of the Goddess-as-Crone"
The first sentence isn't even done yet and already it's got the crone theory that she tries to push on everything (none of the figures of Mara have anything to do with crones) and capitalizes the term for religious purposes. And, to top it off, all but the relatively recent (last 500 years or so) references to characters named Mara say that Mara is a male figure, not female. So this exceedingly ancient name isn't a crone and isn't even a goddess.
Then we have: "The gypsies, with their traditions rooted in Hinduism, knew Mara to be the death goddess who trapped the soul of the Enchanted Huntsman in a mirror and caused his death--" I bought the book she references, guess what... Mara in this relatively recent fairy tale is a gypsy girl, not a goddess. The one doing the magic is the Devil (called as such, the typical Christian male one). Mara loved the huntsman and didn't want him to die. Walker's summary of it doesn't accurately describe the tale at all. Her description of it ends: "a myth that paralleled ancient Pelasgian stories of the death of Dionysus" (in another reference in the book she outright calls Mara's huntsman "Dionysus" and doesn't claim it's a parallel but the exact figure even though it's more than a thousands years later and the wrong country -- the book isn't even internally self-consistent). If you look up the Dionysus myth that she conflates the gypsy folklore with, you'll find that they aren't related at all, except by the loosest of wishful thinking interpretations.
And then later in this entry she references supposed related goddesses like Mari, etc. that *no other source anywhere* (excepting those who borrowed from this book) has any records or even hints at. A lot of the entries are like this, in that they talk about feminine names that were never thought of as goddesses by any source out there, but she assumes they must have been because of her bias and a lot of twisting and misunderstanding of linguistics.
And that's just one entry. Researching the other things she writes about turns up just as many errors and outright distortions. She'll mention a specific moon goddess, reference an obscure 100-year old book in her footnote to support it, but looking it up shows that the original author was talking about a moon god, not a goddess. She'll talk about a trinity of Egyptian goddesses but actual research shows that they weren't thought of as such. It's so bad that I have not yet found a single entry in the entire book that doesn't have at least one major error, and it's usually several per paragraph.
I have nothing against pagan beliefs, and I think they are probably one of the most healthy religious faiths that exist. Pointing out that this book is horrible isn't attacking a belief system, it's attacking incredibly flawed and biased research. There are enough real historical goddess beliefs that nobody should have to make them up if they want to look to them for personal growth and religious faith. It's too bad that Walker was so insecure that she felt the need to twist everything all around, and it's even more of a shame that some people feel the need to defend her. Walker was wrong, which doesn't make paganism or feminism any weaker. You are only weak if you insist upon basing your own personal self-image upon the delusions of a highly discredited author.
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