Author: benebell

Playful Heart Tarot by Kitten Chops

On By benebellIn deck review4 Comments

The Playful Heart Tarot is the sweet and gentle medicine we need right now. Reminiscent of children’s book illustrations, Kitten Chops or Zaara has created a therapeutic tarot deck for all ages.

The cards are printed on 340 gsm black core cardstock with a micro linen finish. That means they shuffle beautifully. There’s enough yield in the cardstock for any type of shuffler, but the micro linen gives your deck resilience.

I’ve found Playful Heart Tarot to be a surprisingly powerful and effective deck in inner child exploration, specifically to help calm anxiety or anger, to rekindle happiness and overturn emotional apathy, and to quiet that self-criticism or self-sabotage.

The deck comes in a rainbow foil tuck box and I love that it’s produced in Taiwan.

The package comes to you sealed with a sticker stamp: “All things wonderful are readily available.” I just love all the attention to detail and extra touches Kitten Chops as thought of when putting this deck together.

A 78-card deck, the Playful Heart Tarot also includes 4 bonus cards, which the free downloadable guidebook explains. You can scroll through the guidebook, provided below, to get a sense of the aesthetics and point of view of the deck.

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America Eclipsed Tarot by Laurent Lewis Colvin and Morpheus Ravenna Anima

On By benebellIn deck review3 Comments

The America Eclipsed Tarot by Laurent Lewis Colvin and illustrated by Morpheus Ravenna Anima marks the confluence of esoteric tarot and progressive politics. Birthed in one of my favorite places of all time, Berkeley, this tarot deck alchemizes the energies of social justice to read prophetically about social justice.

Colvin merges Jungian psychology, tarot, astrology, and progressive political values into a truly subversive deck intended to challenge the status quo. The deck art expresses the most pressing social justice issues facing our country in the 21st century.

To start, take a look at Key 19 and Key 20. The Sun card expresses solar energy and how through solar power we can achieve glory and success. Key 20, which in traditional tarot iconography depicts the Rapture, here we still see Archangel Gabriel with the flaming hair, but here we see a banner with a Bernie bird and instead of the traditional coffins, we see voting booths. The ribbon around the angel’s neck is Latin for “Choosing the lesser of two evils still puts the Keys to the kingdom in the devil’s hands.”

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Lions Gateway Tarot by Jessica Leigh Henry

On By benebellIn deck review, tarot8 Comments

The Lions Gateway Tarot by Jessica Leigh Henry caught my attention pretty much right away. I felt so inexplicably drawn to the art. The line drawings are wood-burned via pyrography and then colored in with oil paints.

Above to the left you’ll see the First Edition version and to the right, the Second Edition. The one out on my reading table and in everyday use is the Second Edition.

There’s an Old World European feel to these cards. Richly colored and elegant, this is a beautiful and also easy-to-read with tarot deck for professional reading settings. If you’re the hired tarot reader at a book fair, writers conference, or an art gallery opening exhibition, this is the deck I’d bring to read with.

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Charting Your Goal: The Parade Spread

On By benebellIn book review, Sightsee the Tarot, tarot, tarot community, tarot exercises2 Comments

The launch date for the Pride Tarot, a collaborative artists deck from U.S. Games, is scheduled for this month, April 2020. This video and companion blog post is going up during difficult global times. We’re in the midst of a world-wide shelter-in-place quarantine and most of our business-as-usual has been put on pause. People are anxious, feeling insecure and uncertain. I’ve found great comfort and insight in my reading with the Parade Spread and I hope you will, too.

Download the Worksheet (PDF)

Charting Your Goal or Journey

The Pride Parade Tarot Spread

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What Writing and Publishing a Novel Means to Me + Asian American Kid Problems =)

On By benebellIn book writing, personal6 Comments

Sigh. I’m querying a novel that concludes in the time period of the bubonic plague. During the Covid-19 outbreak and global quarantine. And lots of literary agents on social media are posting about how this is really not the time to be sending apocalyptic novels to them because they just want to read something light, fun, and heart-warming.

Like most of you, I’ve been sheltering in place for several weeks now and figured why not document the thoughts that have had quite a bit of time and space to magnify in my head around the trajectory of my novel writing journey.

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The Oracle of Human Destiny: Cartomancy + Bibliomancy Reading Method

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, free download, holistic horoscopes, oracle deck6 Comments

This is fun! A delightful soul and kindred spirit gifted me with the above book, which you can download a pdf of at the Internet Archive, since it’s in the public domain. The Oracle of Human Destiny (1825) is credited to someone going by the pen name “Madame Victorine Le Normand” and is written in first person, with references to doing divinatory readings for Napoleon.

You’ll need a standard deck of 52 playing cards. I opted for the pips, pages (knaves), queens, and kings from a Tarot de Marseilles deck. Works just as well.

From the below charts, decide which of these 12 questions (along the right side of the page spreads) best expresses what you want to ask the oracle. Then note the corresponding zodiac sign on the left side of the page spread.

Table of the Celestial Signs with Corresponding Questions, Part 1 of 2

For example, say I want to ask about financial stability to come, business opportunities, or employment. I might opt for Libra and the question I’ll be asking will be, “Inform me whether I shall ever be Promoted, Wealthy, or Fortunate?”

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Novel Writing Adventures & New Vlog Series

On By benebellIn book writing, personal16 Comments

So I did a Thing. I completed a novel. I say “completed” instead of “wrote” because I’ve written many incomplete novels over the decades. This is the first one I pushed over the finish line. Yay.

For those interested in following the journey of my novel manuscript, I’ll be sharing the experience by way of a vlog series on my YouTube channel.

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The Fives: Tarot Card Meanings

On By benebellIn Learn the Tarot, Spirit Keeper's Tarot, tarot, tarot card meanings, tarot community, tarot symbolism4 Comments

New to this video lecture series?

Start Here

The above-linked Introduction page will give you an overview of what this series is about and provide a course contents listing.

The Fives is the seventh of seventeen videos in this series, “Tarot Card Meanings with Benebell.”

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The Little Work: Magic to Transform Your Everyday Life by Durgadas A. Duriel

On By benebellIn book review, Magical in the Mundane1 Comment

The Little Work: Magic to Transform Your Everyday Life (Llewellyn, 2020) by Durgadas Allon Duriel is exactly the kind of book I want to see more of. A fresh, modern take on inner alchemical work, this primer text will help you weave magic into the mundane. On that count, Duriel begins by reminding us that there is no such thing as the mundane. Rather, it’s about seeing the magic in what we otherwise have always perceived as the mundane.

Well-researched, thorough, and the kind of beginner text on contemporary magic that we should be sharing with those new to the craft, The Little Work builds confidence, knowledge, practical experience, and gives you the tools to approach the craft with intelligence, discipline, and also compassion. Duriel also inspires you to trust your intuition and lean in to your very personal, unique connection with Spirit.

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Elemental Directional Correspondences in Ritual Magic, East vs. West: How Do You Reconcile Conflicts?

On By benebellIn astrology, cartomancy, divination, free download, grimoire, Learn the Tarot, Magical in the Mundane, opinion, personal, personal spirituality, promotional, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, tarot, tarot card meanings, tarot community, tarot exercises, traditional witchcraft12 Comments

One of my favorite personal rewards from launching the Witchcraft Fundamentals course is the Google Group, where all of us are exchanging insights, asking tough questions, trying to answer tough questions, and getting to know each other. To give you a sampling of what that e-mail list-serv group is like, I’m sharing something I wrote on there in one of the threads started by a practitioner of both Eastern and Western metaphysics.

The question presented is, in short, how do you reconcile Eastern elemental-directional correspondences with Western elemental-directional correspondences?

By the way, scroll all the way down for the PDF downloads of this post, which you can then print out and tuck into whatever reference manual for your metaphysical studies you have going on.

IN THIS WESTERN WITCHCRAFT COURSE, you’ll learn fairly soon that there are different systems of elemental-directional correspondences even within the umbrella of Western occult philosophy, and we cover three of them in this course:

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