Benebell Wen

✦ About

Benebell Wen is a Taiwanese-American tarot reader, author, and practicing corporate attorney based in Northern California. For roughly the past two decades, her primary profession has been corporate law — she is licensed to practice in both California and New York and works in-house on corporate transactions. "Benebell Wen" is itself a pseudonym derived from her Chinese name, a deliberate choice that lets her keep her legal career and her esoteric writing in separate lanes. She is Taiwanese American, with Hakka heritage on her father's side and Hokkien heritage on her mother's side, and she describes her family and cultural background as the most significant marker of her identity. She is the eldest of three sisters who went on to very different careers — one became a partner at a top-five global law firm in Manhattan, another has pursued opening a Michelin-star restaurant in Texas. Wen holds a degree in Creative Writing and Rhetoric from a public university on the East Coast and a law degree from a private law school on the West Coast, where she earned a certificate in Public Interest and Social Justice Law and served as a Law Review contributor, publishing on Critical Race Theory and Asian feminist jurisprudence. Her spiritual formation grew out of a household that identified as Buddhist while also practicing Taoist traditions; as a child she spent time in monasteries learning from monks and nuns, and she continues to visit temples both for community and for what she calls "folk magic" purposes. She is direct about how she frames this work, stating plainly, "I'm religious. Not spiritual," and she resists being cast as a guru or teacher: "I'm not a teacher. I don't have a single degree or even certification" that would qualify her to instruct others in spirituality. Instead, she positions herself as an avid seeker of esoteric knowledge who shares her findings rather than handing down teachings — a content creator, in her own words, rather than a master. That research-driven, self-taught sensibility runs through her published work. She is the author of Holistic Tarot, a comprehensive guide to tarot reading; The Tao of Craft: Fu Talismans and Casting Sigils in the Eastern Esoteric Traditions, which examines Taoist magical practice; and I Ching, the Oracle, her own translation of the Book of Changes accompanied by cultural and historical annotation aimed at restoring the hexagrams to their shamanic origins. She also illustrated and self-published the Spirit Keeper's Tarot, a deck that went on to considerable commercial success, and has worked on further tarot projects such as the Etteilla Tarot of Thoth-Hermes. Beyond her books, Wen has produced tarot education videos on YouTube since 2014 and maintains a blog, a newsletter, and a presence on social media where she writes about tarot, numerology, feng shui, and I Ching interpretation filtered through Taoist and Buddhist philosophy. Her website also hosts free courses on East Asian esotericism, tarot foundations, and the sacred arts. Throughout, she is candid about her own imperfections and contradictions, presenting herself not as a spiritual authority but as an authentic, sometimes flawed practitioner working through inherited traditions in public.