Vous voulez voir cette page en français ? Cliquez ici.


or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets
 
 

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

Barbara G Walker
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 44.99
Price: CDN$ 28.21 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
You Save: CDN$ 16.78 (37%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca. Gift-wrap available.
Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).
Want it delivered Tuesday, May 29? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout.

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Hardcover --  
Paperback CDN $28.21  
There is a newer edition of this item:
Women's Encyclopedia Myths Secrets Women's Encyclopedia Myths Secrets
Currently unavailable

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with The Woman's Dictionary Of Symbols And Sacred Objects CDN$ 23.19

The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets + The Woman's Dictionary Of Symbols And Sacred Objects
Price For Both: CDN$ 51.40

Show availability and shipping details

  • This item: The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
    This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details

  • The Woman's Dictionary Of Symbols And Sacred Objects

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details


Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed


Product Details


Product Description

From Amazon

This fascinating, scholarly hodgepodge spotlights the feminist underpinnings of myth, religion, and culture. Before being lionized as zaftig Norse angels who guided strong warriors to Valhalla, Valkyries may have offered rebirth through cannibalization. "Little Red Riding Hood" was based on Diana, goddess of the hunt. Marriage was once considered a sin, not a sacred union: St. Bernard once proclaimed "it was easier for a man to bring the dead back to life than to live with a woman without endangering his soul." A few of the other topics expounded upon are the Milky Way, Cinderella, the moon, and males giving birth. While some of the references put a cranky feminist spin on words that might in context have different meaning--St. Paul's oft-quoted "better to marry than to burn," for example--much in this vast tome will dazzle dabblers and intellectuals alike.

Book Description

Do You Know...

  • where the legend of a cat's nine lives comes from?

  • why "mama" is a word understood in nearly all languages?

  • how the custom of kissing began?

  • whether there really was a female pope?

  • why Cinderella's glass slipper was so important to the Prince?

The answers to these and countless other intriguing questions are given in this compulsively readable, feminist encyclopedia. Twenty-five years in preparation, this unique, comprehensive sourcebook focuses on mythology anthropology, religion, and sexuality to uncover precisely what other encyclopedias leave out or misrepresent. The Woman's Encyclopedia presents the fascinating stories behind word origins, legends, superstitions, and customs. A browser's delight and an indispensable resource, it offers 1,350 entries on magic, witchcraft, fairies, elves, giants, goddesses, gods, and psychological anomalies such as demonic possession; the mystical meanings of sun, moon, earth, sea, time, and space; ideas of the soul, reincarnation, creation and doomsday; ancient and modern attitudes toward sex, prostitution, romance, rape, warfare, death and sin, and more.

Tracing these concepts to their prepatriarchal origins, Barbara G. Walker explores a "thousand hidden pockets of history and custom in addition to the valuable material recovered by archaeologists, orientalists, and other scholars."

Not only a compendium of fascinating lore and scholarship, The Woman's Encyclopedia is a revolutionary book that offers a rare opportunity for both women and men to see our cultural heritage in a fresh light, and draw upon the past for a more humane future.


Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
Sacred alphabets of the ancient world signified birth and beginning by the letter A. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Tag this product

 (What's this?)
Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.
Your tags: Add your first tag
 

 

Customer Reviews

54 Reviews
5 star:
 (24)
4 star:
 (6)
3 star:
 (3)
2 star:
 (4)
1 star:
 (17)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (54 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most helpful customer reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Not at all accurate..., Jan 9 2004
By 
blackrose "rosendubh" (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets (Paperback)
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.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Not entirely accurate but can't be dismissed as well..., July 17 2004
This review is from: The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets (Paperback)
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars More fantasy than fact, Oct 23 2003
By 
D. Norder (Knoxville, TN, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets (Paperback)
There are a lot of people who want to believe this book is an accurate source of information about mythology and history. Unfortunately, wishing does not make it so. One of the reviewers below claims she is a mythologist and can back up the accuracy of this book, and that people bashing it must be doing so out of their religious beliefs. It appears to me that the supporters of this book are the ones doing it out of faith and dogma, and I say that as a mythologist who has tried to find evidence to support her statements and can't.

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.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
 Go to Amazon.com to see all 64 reviews  3.3 out of 5 stars 
 
 
Most recent customer reviews











Only search this product's reviews



Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject


Feedback


Amazon.ca Privacy Statement Amazon.ca Shipping Information Amazon.ca Returns & Exchanges