Rating: 
Summary: excellent for entraintainment, or just relaxation read
Review: maybe her work is not 100% seriously and perfectly researched. but i found this book extremelly intersted, and me and my friends had a great time looking through the definitions of various objects, animals, etc, etc etc. listing of the contents: round and oval motifs, long motifs, 3 way motifs, 4 way motifs, multipointed motifs, sacred objects, secular sacred objects, rituals, deities' signs, supernaturals, zodiac, body parts, nature, animals, birds, insects, floewrs, plants, trees, fruit and foodstuffs, minerals, stones and shells.there is an index, and each section lists all the items in that section in the ToC.
Rating: 
Summary: Objectivity lost by personal obsessions
Review: Ms. Walker seems to have three things on her mind: 1) Female supremacy, 2) Sex, and 3) discrediting Christianity. While some of her descriptions seem to measure up with other texts and resources, she seems bent on making every symbol somehow related to sex, female supremacy and discrediting Christianity. This theme pervades her material to the point that I began to doubt her credibility on any level. I have a lot of problems with her etymology (word origins) which seem to be her own imaginings. Further, she seems obsessed with femininity to the point that everything has origins with a Female deity-- even male deities which, according to their respective religions, are autonomous. Her ruthless attacks on Christianity strike me as odd only in that Christianity is the only religion that she maligns. All other religions seem to be just fine, but one gets the sense that she has some personal vendetta against Christianity. I found myself wondering if the book was really about bashing Christianity, or providing an objective resource for symbolism.
Rating:
Summary: a whole lot of wishful thinking
Review: My response to Walker's book is ``that's nice dear.'' I feel her scholarship is shallow at best, and unsupported. This is a handy reference book, I suppose, but don't take any of it seriously. I will look something up in this book, and then check six or seven other sources. It distresses me that this book is so widely consulted in women's circles.
Rating:
Summary: Buy Barbara Walker an Etymological Dictionary!
Review: Someone should start the "Buy Barbara Walker an Etymological Dictionary" Fund, except that I'm sure she must be able to afford one by now from the royalties on her books. Seriously, although this book can be a fun read if you don't take it too seriously, it's filled with fallacies and fantasies, and the "research" in it is suspect to say the least. When I first read this book about 10 years ago, I found it fascinating and quite inspiring, though I was somewhat doubtful of the "facts" contained within it. When I showed it to someone who'd studied Sanskrit, and he saw that she'd translated "swastika" as "so mote it be," he pointed out that she'd obviously made that up, as "swastika" really means "small lucky thing." Many of her other etymologies are just as made-up as the one for "swastika," such as her etymology of "Jehovah" as "I, Woman." It's hard to believe that there are some who take this work seriously, beyond as an inspiration for non-critically thinking Goddess-worshippers. You don't have to be a "patriarchal monotheist" to realize that Walker is no scholar and that her writings do much more to discredit Paganism (Neo- or otherwise) than any fundamentalist Christian's rantings and ravings against the subject.
Rating:
Summary: a whole lot of wishful thinking
Review: The author takes her same personal approach. Leaving one to wonder the "true" meaning behind her books. She only focuses on Norse and Christian symbols. (Well, Greek too). I've read her other books as well and I'm growing tired of the same underlying negative tone regarding men. However...there is something about her that I like...I'll keep her books and refer back to them at later date. Maybe my feelings will change.
Rating: 
Summary: Possibly not the true facts...
Review: The author takes her same personal approach. Leaving one to wonder the "true" meaning behind her books. She only focuses on Norse and Christian symbols. (Well, Greek too). I've read her other books as well and I'm growing tired of the same underlying negative tone regarding men. However...there is something about her that I like...I'll keep her books and refer back to them at later date. Maybe my feelings will change.
Rating: 
Summary: Please don't do what I did!!
Review: This is a fascinating book that really challenges the way that historians have interpreted the past. The problem is, it's not accurate. The author seems to have made up her own interpretations to make ancient writings seem more female-oriented. There is a symbol in this book ('ma') that she claims had the orginal meaning of "mother goddess, creator of all", an interpretation she insists predates Christianity. I loved it so much I had it tatooed on my leg. Welllll.... AFTER the fact, I learn that some people can still read this ancient language and seem puzzled when I explain what I believed was the translation. Last week, five years after getting this tatoo, a stranger in a hot tub while I was on vacation says, "That's not what your tatoo says! That means 'what'! You've got 'what' written on your leg!". I defended it, saying that it has personal significance and that's what matters, but I am humiliated. Apparently Walker was examining ancient documents, found the word 'ma' in sacred texts, and decided to publish her errroneous conclusion that this is proof of goddess worship. When I got this tatoo, the web really wasn't readily available and I had few options for researching the meaning of the symbol, so I took Walker's translation. This morning, I typed it in a special search engine, and yes, my tatoo means 'what'. I wish I had some legal recourse to get this sh-- removed from my body. Read this book as entertaining fiction only.
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