Author Spotlight: Benebell Wen
Categories: Metaphysics & Unexplained Phenomena
Corporate law and tarot divination haven’t always gone hand in hand. Yet author Benebell Wen works comfortably at that intersection, balancing a full-time legal career with her tarot reading practice. Wen is the author of Holistic Tarot: An Integrative Approach to Using Tarot for Personal Growth, approaching tarot through an analytical context.
Holistic Tarot is Wen’s first book, which is a complete guide to using the tarot to foster personal development. It teaches how to use tarot as a decision-making tool, for mind-mapping, removing creative blocks, and triggering intuition. In the book’s first year, it has won the Tarosophy Award by the Tarosophy Association of Tarot Professionals for Best Mass Market Book and received praise from some of the biggest names in the tarot world, including Mary Greer, Barbara Moore, Joan Bunning, Anthony Louis, Corrine Kenner, Dr. Art Rosengarten, Dr. James Wanless, Chic and Tabatha Cicero, and more.
Wen is the eldest of three daughters born to Taiwanese immigrants, and was raised in Vestal, New York where she graduated from Vestal High School and Binghamton University. From a young age, she gravitated toward the esoteric, reading every book in the occult section at the local Vestal Public Library. There she picked up cartomancy, or divination with playing cards, and eventually learned tarot.
“Tarot has always been a passion of mine, one I didn’t really talk about,” says Wen. “But for those who really know me, Holistic Tarot should come as no surprise. I was sewing poppets in high school, reading tarot for sorority girls in college, and even wrote a monthly horoscopes column in a university magazine.”
Over the years, Wen kept copious notes in her journals—absorbing every text on the subject she could get her hands on, from the 1800s to contemporary tarot luminaries—and also read tarot for the public. Those notes and client reading case studies formed the foundation of Holistic Tarot, an 896-page treatise that explores the self-reflective uses of tarot for nurturing creativity and intuition.
“I do most of my tarot readings for business executives, corporate attorneys, investors, and even financial analysts, all of whom I’ve found to rely heavily on their intuition. They just don’t use the word ‘intuition’ in their vocabulary, and most don’t even know how they arrive at their hunches,” Wen explains. “But if you’re open to it, tarot can help you control those intuitive impulses and teach you to use your intuition productively in the business, corporate, and financial worlds. That’s one of the objectives I hope Holistic Tarot can accomplish.”
Distinct from its tarot text predecessors, Holistic Tarot treats tarot divination as an academic subject. Wen acknowledges that her legal education played a formative role in her treatment of tarot. “Law school taught me how to think and write critically, and I wanted to bring that analytical spirit to tarot and demonstrate the intellectual intricacies of tarot to an audience that is otherwise skeptical of it.” Wen is a graduate of Santa Clara University School of Law, where she received her juris doctorate.
Today Wen works as in-house legal counsel for a venture capital firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. In her free time, she continues to perform tarot readings for the public. Wen also practices feng shui, I Ching divination, numerology, and astrology. She currently resides in Castro Valley, California with her husband, a financial analyst.
Order a copy of Holistic Tarot here.
Tags: Astrology Benebell Wen Biography & Memoir Tarot & Divination
About the Author
Marina Snyder
Marina is the Marketing & Digital Programs Coordinator at North Atlantic Books. After living in New Orleans and Amsterdam, and exploring a couple of continents, she returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to work at NAB. She's passionate about astrology, nonfiction books, and sustainable living, as well as all things metaphysical.
