First published November 10, 2019.
Salvador Dalí's tarot is a complete 78-card deck that the Spanish surrealist painted in the 1970s and first published in 1984. It started life as a commission for a James Bond film, was never used on screen, and ended up as one of the most collectable artist-made decks ever printed. Taschen reissued the full deck in 2019 with a guidebook by tarot author Johannes Fiebig, which is the easiest way to see the cards today.
If you are curious about it, you probably want to know three things: where the deck came from, what the cards actually look like, and whether it works as a usable tarot or mainly as a piece of art. Here is what is known about each.
From a Bond film commission to a finished deck
In the early 1970s the producer Albert R. Broccoli approached Dalí about a tarot deck for Live and Let Die (1973), Roger Moore's first outing as 007. The story needed one: the character Solitaire, played by Jane Seymour, reads the cards to foresee Bond's moves, so a striking deck would be on screen again and again.
The partnership fell apart. According to Literary Hub's account of the deck's history, the artist's fee was reportedly too high for the producers, and the film used Fergus Hall's Tarot of the Witches instead. Dalí, however, did not abandon the idea. He kept working on the cards on his own terms, and the finished set appeared more than a decade later, in 1984, a few years before his death in 1989. That first printing sold out and has become expensive on the collector market.
What the cards look like
Each of the 78 cards is an individual artwork. Most combine gouache painting with collage, which suits Dalí's habit of placing familiar images in strange new company. Rather than painting every figure from scratch, he often cut into reproductions of older masterpieces and then painted over and around them, adding his trademark touches: soft landscapes, floating objects, crutches, roses and theatrical light.
Several cards carry a personal message. Dalí cast himself as the Magician, the card of skill, will and showmanship, which is hard to read as anything other than a self-portrait of how he saw his own role. His wife and muse Gala, who was herself said to read the tarot, appears as the Empress, the card of abundance and creative power. The Ten of Swords, a card of painful endings, becomes the assassination of Julius Caesar. Literary Hub also notes that the Queen of Cups is a playful reworking of François Clouet's portrait of Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of France, and that Dalí reportedly painted Sean Connery as the Emperor, though that identification is not certain.
The result feels less like a uniform printed pack and more like a portable gallery. Some cards are dense and dreamlike, others are surprisingly restrained, with a single borrowed figure set against open space. Laying several side by side is the best way to see the recurring motifs and the tension between the deck's fixed structure and Dalí's urge to break it.
A short history of tarot, and why artists love it
Tarot did not begin as a fortune-telling tool. The earliest known decks were made in northern Italy around the 1440s, in cities such as Milan and Ferrara, for trick-taking card games. Players added a set of trump cards and the Fool to an ordinary four-suit pack, and versions of those games are still played in parts of Europe.
The mystical reputation came much later. In Paris in the 1780s, writers such as Antoine Court de Gébelin and Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known as Etteilla, made claims about ancient Egyptian origins that historians regard as unfounded, and Etteilla produced what is considered the first deck designed for occult use. From then on, the standard 78-card esoteric deck took shape: 22 Major Arcana, from the Fool through the numbered trumps, and 56 Minor Arcana in four suits of 14 cards.
That structure is a gift to visual artists. It offers a fixed cast of archetypes (the Lovers, Death, the Tower, the Moon) that every viewer half recognises, while leaving complete freedom in how each one is drawn. Painters, illustrators and occultists from Aleister Crowley's circle to the Swiss artist H. R. Giger have produced their own decks for exactly that reason. For a surrealist who built a career on dream imagery and symbolism, the format was an almost perfect fit.
The Taschen edition: what you get
Because original 1984 sets are scarce and pricey, most people meet the deck through Taschen's boxed edition of the Dalí Tarot, released in November 2019. Taschen is known for large, lavish art books, and here it reproduces all 78 cards together with a multilingual companion book.
The book is written by Johannes Fiebig, a German author and publisher who has written widely on tarot. It covers how the deck came about and gives a short interpretation for each card, plus simple instructions for laying out a reading. That makes the set approachable for someone who knows Dalí's paintings but has never handled a tarot deck, and equally useful for tarot readers who want to understand the art-historical references hidden in the collages.
If you are buying it as an art object, look at it the way you would look at a print portfolio: the card size is small, so details that are obvious in a museum-size reproduction can be easy to miss. A magnifying glass is genuinely helpful. You can find the Taschen set here.
Art, symbolism and the question of prediction
Enthusiasts often say the tarot offers a different way of seeing reality, and it is easy to understand why Dalí, who described his own method as a way of making irrational images concrete, was drawn to that idea. Many modern readers use the cards as prompts for reflection: a picture to think through a problem with, rather than a forecast.
It is worth being clear about the limits, though. There is no scientific evidence that tarot cards can predict future events. Their value lies in the imagery, the long cultural tradition behind them and the conversations they start. Dalí's deck is best enjoyed on those terms, as a surrealist's personal commentary on a 500-year-old set of symbols.
How people reacted to the reissue
When Taschen announced the new edition in autumn 2019, art and tarot fans shared the news enthusiastically on social media. A few of those reactions are below; one of the original posts has since been removed from X.
I always like his work it's like a glimpse into his mind.
— Lady Jane Grey Revisited (@GreyRevisited) October 23, 2019
OMG YAY
— Malediction Mel ديبوك (@DybbukStay) October 23, 2019
(This post is no longer available on X.)
Very cool!
— RedwoodResistance (@CoolGreenPines) February 7, 2018
Today, cards from an original printed deck have also appeared in museum displays, including the Morgan Library & Museum's tarot exhibition in New York, a sign of how far the deck has travelled from its origins as an abandoned film prop.
Sources: Literary Hub: Salvador Dalí made a tarot deck for the James Bond film Live and Let Die; Wikipedia: Tarot; reissue first reported by Open Culture (2019).
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