There is probably no other member of the world Tarot community who has created and made available more material to help us all learn and enjoy the Tarot than she has. And as if the sheer quantity of resources she’s created and assembled for us weren’t enough, the mind-boggling quality and completeness of her work is unsurpassed.
Even just a quick look at her extremely well-organised website, benebellwen.com, shows you immediately that Benebell is a person with a vast knowledge of a vast number of topics. And her energy to share that knowledge is boundless. She doesn’t just give you information. She provides boatloads of additional supporting materials to bolster your studies. It really must be seen to be believed.
Benebell’s attention to detail in every topic, her way of leaving absolutely no stone unturned would seem almost maddening if not for her charming amiability and relaxed unhurried style. You will travel happily along with her for the ride of your life through whirlwinds of esoteric studies from perspectives you didn't know existed.
Her latest gift for us, the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot, is her gorgeous hand-drawn deck that comes with a hefty 400-page companion book. She has even created a video series to help you get started with the deck: Orientation Course on the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot.
It’s nothing short of astonishing.
With her typical generosity of spirit, she agreed to do this interview and has provided us all with her deeply thoughtful answers giving us a just a bit more insight into the beautiful and endlessly prolific mind of Benebell Wen.
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JM: Who is the Spirit Keeper of the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot?
BW: Put one way, the Spirit Keeper is someone who has developed mastery over the many facets of the inner self, facets of the astral spirit (or astral body) and all the ways those facets of the inner self connect to the collective that we are all a part of. By mastering control over the inner selves, you can better navigate the collective.
Put another way, it’s someone who sees beyond the physical, material appearance of people, places, and things, and is able to tap in to the unseen of those people, places, and things.
JM: You created a series of orientation videos for the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot. In the one titled “Deck Creator Intentions” you share a very personal bit of information about yourself. I found it very moving the way you described the decks as your children.
How has the response you’ve gotten to this deck made you feel, as it’s creator, as it’s mother?
BW: I think it is as you would expect it to be. Some love it, some don’t understand it at all. You know how when a child just wants to go somewhere the mother knows is going to be dangerous or possibly not safe for the child, but that child is heading in that direction anyway? Navigating that when you feel a maternal instinct is really challenging and has brought on a lot of undue anxiety. =) It has also caused me to act irrationally.
JM: Is there any card in the deck that is especially meaningful to you?
BW: I don’t even know where to begin. The Six of Scepters (Six of Wands) titled The Champion has your typical RWS Six of Wands vibe to it, except the wand with the wreath of victory on it is stabbed into the leg of the woman seated on a throne and she’s bleeding profusely. Yet her face gives zero indication of pain. This artistic and interpretive decision might be unsettling to some for such an iconic happy card.
Yet for me it was an important depiction to convey because victory never comes unaccompanied by pain, because victory requires sacrifice and it isn’t until after you’ve achieved victory that you start to realize what you had to give up as the cost of your success.
The Five of Swords, titled The Hector (Greek myth inspired; Trojan War) depicts a swordsman who has defeated his opponents by unfair advantage, or so you think. However, the swordsman is noticeably depicted as left-handed. In battle, when everyone on the field is right-handed, a left-handed swordsman is very much in an unfair position and needs to learn many tactics of overcompensation in order to survive that battlefield. I wanted you to see who this swordsman is now, in the scene, but also imply all the personal challenges he had to overcome to get where he is and maybe facilitate empathy and understanding for why he is the way he is.
Then I guess maybe The Haunt, or Nine of Swords. I have this personal running theory that you can tell whether someone has ever truly experienced depression and states of melancholy in their lives by how they would depict the Nine of Swords card in tarot.
JM: Is there any card that gave you trouble?
BW: Yeah. All the court cards. I really struggled with how I wanted to convey the concept of angelic beings that mediate between the spirit realms and the material world. I didn’t want, like, buff dudes and hot chicks with fairy wings and golden halos in white gowns. It was really hard for me to delineate everything I wanted to convey about the Empyrean Courts. Also, the Kings and Queens are intersex in my deck and gender fluid. I struggled with exactly how I could convey that in a way that would do the concept justice.
- The Four Kings
JM: You use an interesting phrase in describing this deck and the way it mixes various approaches to tarot. You called it a kind of “mental chemistry.” To me this connotes a “result” that is not necessarily the sum of it’s parts, but something new all together. Is that a fairly accurate understanding? And what is the role of the reader in this chemistry?
BW: I would say yes, that was absolutely my intention and I hope that intention comes through. However, the deck itself doesn’t spell out what the result is. The reader is the chemist who takes the elements given, the periodic table as reference, and has to go with that in the reader’s own direction. The mental chemistry is done by the reader, not by me. I did mental chemistry for myself through working and crafting with the deck and arrived at a conclusion for myself, but the cards themselves aren’t an answer. They’re just the elements and the periodic table.
JM: The Spirit Keeper’s Tarot is an incredibly detailed, masterfully illustrated work. Can you tell us about your background in art? Do you have any formal art training?
BW: I don’t have any formal training in art, except to say I remember that when I was growing up, everyone who knew my father when he was a boy would just go on and on about what a talented artist he was. (My father is a polymer scientist. Or engineer. Or something like that. It’s kind of sad that I have no specific idea what my dad did for a living—he’s retired now and spending his days playing tennis and doing qi gong—other than to say it’s science.) And then they’d tell me I inherited my father’s traits.
In high school I was on track to attend an elite art school, but my mother preferred that I not become an artist for my occupation of choice and steered me toward law. Actually, I may have to say yes, that actually, I have had formal art training when I was younger because every art teacher I ever had really devoted a lot of time and attention to training me, teaching me techniques beyond what we were learning in class, I always had extra homework or projects I was given, and in fact, I would be gifted with their old art textbooks from their grad school days. I won local and state art contests. My art teachers pushed me to enter those contests and went out of their way, on their own dimes, to send my work in to all of these events.
As an adult now, I’m also a collector of fine art and I hope that some of the deck reviews I do on my blog have given hints to that background knowledge in the fine arts. For instance, in deck reviews I’m always trying to categorize the genre or style of the artwork, trying to get a sense of artist intent, very interested in art medium used, you know, typical art critic stuff.
JM: In “The Book of Maps,” the companion book to the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot, you describe your evocation of A.E. Waite and Aleister Crowley to help you reconcile their outwardly disparate approaches to the Tarot. Do you think they were able to reconcile their works with each other’s or was that entirely up to you to sort out after their visit?
BW: I don’t know if they reconciled it with each other in any sense of that notion. From my perspective, I feel like that dumb, oblivious kid whose parents are on the verge of divorce but trying to play it cool in front of the kid and spelling out bad words in hopes the kid won’t understand. I don’t know if that even makes sense or sounds credible. I do feel there were things going on I was intentionally not being made privy to and was being told what I needed to know, and more or less I was cool with that.
- A.E. Waite & Aleister Crowley
JM: Regarding the business side of creating a Tarot deck, you’ve made a few extremely detailed blog posts recently that define and break down the real costs faced by an artist/creator to bring a deck into the world. You’ve sort of lifted the veil on some of the nitty-gritty aspects that the public are not normally privy to.
What made you decide to do that and what do you think the result has been (or will be)?
BW: I think a lot of it is just my personality. In other areas of life, other projects far removed from the tarot world, I was like that, too. I always want to be like, hey, this is what is going on behind the scenes to get you the final product you see. This is what it costs and why it costs you what it costs. So I simply transferred that personality tick to what I was doing with self-publishing a tarot deck.
I don’t know what the result of my efforts is, but I hope it will garner more sympathy for self-published deck creators and the courage it takes to self-publish a deck.
JM: You’re online courses are, in a word, intense. A friend of mine refers to them as “power-packed info.” And it is a wonder to us all how much work goes into preparing and organizing all the materials and videos etc. much less just knowing all that stuff.
I’m not going to ask you how you do it (I’m assuming you have an army of magic pixies who assist) but I would like to ask about your motivation for creating these courses and all the other instructional videos and materials. What inspires you to engage in such an extraordinary effort?
BW: I set out to create the online independent study courses I would want to take myself. Also, yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’s not a lot of extra work on my end, where by “extra” I mean work I wouldn’t otherwise do. The organization, the documents, the references, the written texts are things I would have done for myself privately anyway. All that content would exist with or without any intention to turn it into an online course offering. That’s just my method. That’s what I do for myself anyway. It’s just kinda cool that now people are willing to pay me money to have a copy of it for themselves.
My hard drive has reams upon reams of incomplete manuscripts on every subject matter you can think of, from a 400-page unfinished research book on feminist jurisprudence to books, worksheets, and reference materials I made for myself on feng shui, Chinese astrology, Western astrology in various systems, numerology, palmistry, tarot of course, how to run a tarot business, hand mudras, energy healing, and copious, organized filing systems of notes I’ve taken on various esoteric subjects I enjoy studying.
An online course is simply what happens when I’ve had a few weeks of time to dive into one of those scary file folders full of stuff and organize it into something coherent.
JM: How do you relax?
BW: Sleep. I also love to eat.
(editor's note: see benebell's instagram to appreciate her love for food!)
JM: The world tarot community is coming together everywhere, forming groups and communities, sharing and creating. New decks are constantly published, new people are coming to the tarot every day and looking for places to learn and practice and discuss a thousand different topics.
You yourself have created a vast and loyal following for all your work and that following continues to grow.
To what might you attribute all this modern enthusiasm for the cards?
BW: I have no idea. Maybe it’s just the Internet. Now it’s a lot easier for like-minded folks to congregate. You can find your tribe online, whereas before, forget about being the only tarot reader in town; you might not even know you love the tarot because you don’t even have access to its existence. It might be hard to find multiple books with multiple points of view on the subject. Maybe you still think you can only read tarot with the Celtic Cross and there simply is no other way.
It’s also a lot easier to mobilize communities and special interest groups through social media. With easier access to a knit community, you can fan the flames of your interest and really take your passions to the next level. For better or for worse, we enable each other to buy more tarot decks, to try out different spreads, to read more tarot books, and to have provocative conversations even debates about the tarot that foster mutual growth. So maybe the growth in popularity is at least in part self-generated.
JM: Do you have any projects in the works you want to tell us about?
BW: I’m currently working on a redesigned edition of Spirit Keeper’s Tarot. You can sign up for the mailing list where I’ll give you first opportunity and first look at all things relating to the redesign, pre-order launch, sales, etc. Go to http://www.tinyurl.com/SKTnews to sign up.
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I want to thank Benebell Wen for taking the time to do this for us. I strongly urge you to visit her website, http://www.benebellwen.com. And you should probably fix yourself a cup of tea first because you will be there a while.
Be sure to check out her Master Classes.
You can also find and follow Benebell Wen on
YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/c/BenebellWen
Twitter. http://www.twitter.com/tarotanalysis
Instagram. http://www.instagram.com/bellwen
