The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets [Paperback]

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.

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, "Merlin" 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 no good reason. And, to top it off, all but the relatively recent (last 500 years or so) references to Mara say that it 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 is a gypsy girl, not a goddess, the one doing the magic is the Devil (called as such, the typical Christian male one) and Mara loved the huntsman and didn't want him to die. The sentence 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 -- the book isn't even internally self-consistent). So I go look up that myth, and 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. She must have just made them up, assuming that if a word exists with some feminine sounding meaning (with a lot of twisting and misunderstanding of linguistics) then it must have originally been a goddess because she says so. That's kind of like saying that there was an ancient god Testicles because it sounds close to Heracles and it's extremely masculine so must have been a truly important god.

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 scholarship. 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 a shame 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.