In the James Bond movie Live and Let Die, Solitaire (Jane Seymour) is a tarot reader of extraordinary psychic skill. As a Bond fan and a tarot reader, I am interested in the one movie in which these two fascinations of mine intersect. This article explores the details of the cards used in the film.

This article began life when I acquired a vintage Fergus Hall tarot deck (see below) with some unusual features. At first I was just going to do a few inquiries, but one thing led to another and I soon acquired a body of knowledge that seemed valuable to write up. And here we are.

The Fergus Hall Tarot
Very little has been published on the subject of the tarot deck used in LALD. Research in both Bond and tarot sources turned up tantalizing tidbits, but few solid facts.

The producers of the James Bond films, Eon Productions, commissioned Scottish artist Fergus Hall to create a unique tarot deck for use in LALD.  It appears that Hall was unable to complete work in time for the film, which created two interesting discrepancies. First, not all of the tarot cards seen in the film are by Hall, and second, the cards released for sale are different in some significant ways from the cards that appear in the film. We'll get to that in a little bit.

The deck was first released in 1973 under the name James Bond 007 Tarot. The box it came in was yellow and had a Roger Moore film tie-in illustration on the cover. The back of the cards were blue, with a repeated “007” motif. In 1974, the deck was released by U.S. Games Systems Inc. under the name Tarot of the Witches, with a conventional card back known as “tarotee.” The box cover was purple and shows the High Priestess card. At around this time, U.S. Games also released the same deck under the name The Devil's Tarot (I have been unable to find a picture of this version).  It is currently available as Tarot of the Witches with the tarotee back. Because of the profusion of names, and because an entirely different deck known as The Witches' Tarot is popular, most tarot collectors call this deck the Fergus Hall Tarot.

Some Quick Tarot Facts
To understand the history of this deck, it's helpful to know a little about the tarot. A tarot deck has 78 cards, consisting of 22 major arcana, and 56 minor arcana. The minor arcana (or “minors”) are the origins of modern playing cards. There are four suits, each running ace through ten, with four “court” cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King. In modern playing cards, the Knight was dropped, and Jack is another name for Page.

The suits are cups (which correspond to hearts), pentacles, discs, coins, or plates (diamonds), swords (spades), and wands, rods, or batons (clubs).

Historically, it appears that there were two different kinds of cards, tarot and playing cards, which merged to become modern tarot, playing cards meanwhile persisting on their own.

Until 1909, only the “majors” and court cards were fully illustrated. Like playing cards, numbered tarot cards merely had the right number of pips in the appropriate suit. Then came Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith. Waite and Smith were occultists, members of the renowned magickal lodge known as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Together they designed and published the first tarot deck which illustrated all 78 cards. This deck, known as Rider-Waite or Waite-Smith (Rider was the publisher), became the world's most popular and influential tarot. It appears in LALD, as we shall see.

Discrepancies
Two tarot decks appear in LALD: Fergus Hall and Waite-Smith. Both decks appear with the same back, a red 007 pattern. The pattern is the same as the published version, but as far as I have been able to determine, no deck was ever published with a red 007 back; it is only in the movie.

The movie shows cards in the suit “wands.” This suit is “batons” in published form. The movie shows a fully illustrated Six of Swords and a fully illustrated Six of Wands. The published deck has numbered pips for the minors, and these illustrations do not appear.

The Meaning
Tarot cards have generally agreed-upon meanings, but how those meanings are interpreted is very much up to the individual reader. Some readers are far more “by the book,” while others rely more heavily upon intuition. Even a by-the-book reader must interpret, since each card has several possible meanings.

In addition to memorizing meanings and being intuitive, many readers interpret the illustrations. The profusion of tarot decks available today (U.S. Games Systems alone has 129 in their current catalog) is because of the impact illustration has.

Fergus Hall illustrated each suit with different colored backgrounds, and varied the background color for the majors. Color is an important way to derive meaning from a picture. The Rider-Waite deck varies the background less, but uses other colors, such as garments, symbolically.

The plot of LALD has Solitaire as a psychic of profound power—until Bond takes it away, that is. For her, the cards are merely a conduit. Nonetheless, the meanings she ascribes to the cards are roughly accurate; the Six of Swords is a card of travel, and the Tower does indeed bring destruction.

Card Appearances: The Details

1. A Man Comes
Tarot cards first appear at the 12:29 point on my Special Edition DVD (the scene title is “Road Rage”). After the titles, we are introduced to Roger Moore as our new James Bond, when M and Moneypenny arrive in his flat. The next scene shows Solitaire reading cards as Bond flies to New York.

She lays down the following Fergus Hall cards, speaking with each card:

• Knight of Wands (“A man comes”)
• Six of Swords (“He travels quickly”)
• Knight of Swords (“He has purpose”)
• (As we see an exterior shot of Bond's flight, she says “He comes over water, he travels with others.”)
• Six of Wands (“He will oppose”)
• The Tower (“He brings violence and destruction”)

2. Filet of Sole
At about 23:51, Bond meets Solitaire for the first time, at the beginning of the scene titled “It's in the Cards.” This is when Bond has a “nasty turn in a booth” and finds himself in Mr. Big's custody. She is again using the red-backed Fergus Hall deck. We don't actually see card faces until 25:06, they are:

• The Moon
• The High Priestess
• The Queen of Cups

Solitaire has Bond turn over a card and we see

• The Fool (she says “You have found yourself.”)

After Mr. Big enters and leaves, she has Bond pick a card for his future, and we see

• The Lovers

All the cards in this scene are identical to the published version, except for the color of the backs.

3. Breakfast's Up
At 38:30, in the “Morning Fishing” scene, Bond finds a tarot card with his breakfast while waiting for Rosie to get out of the shower. It is the Fergus Hall Queen of Cups, the same card he'd seen Solitaire turn over in the back room of the Filet of Sole.

At exactly 39:00 in the same scene, Bond goes into town and enters a store with a huge tarot display in the window. This is our first glimpse of the Waite-Smith tarot. The large poster is the High Priestess, and this is surrounded by the Ace of Swords and all the Sword court (Page, Knight, Queen, King) on the left, and the Ace of Wands and all the Wand court on the right. All of the cards in the window display are Waite-Smith cards.

4. He Comes Again
At 41:45, the scene “Future Teller” opens with Solitaire at a desk, a great many cards spread out before her. The scene is juxtaposed with images of Bond hang-gliding. We see only one card clearly, and glimpse a bit of another. They are again from the Fergus Hall deck and are:

• The Lovers
• The Chariot (this card can be identified only by the numeral VII)

5. It Must Have Been the Girl's Death
At 46:00, Kananga confronts Solitaire, who is in her truly insane crown-and-cloak get-up. For most of this scene (“Where is Bond Now?”), we cannot see any cards. There are six cards laid out face up in front of Solitaire, but they are barely visible. The cards are definitely Fergus Hall. The best shot of the cards is at 47:09.
On our right (Solitaire's left):

• The High Priestess
• The Moon
• The Queen of Cups

On our left:

• I am almost certain the top card is Judgment, but I cannot make out the other three.

Blasphemous Bond
At 49:05, Bond lays out the Chariot, the Fool, and the High Priestess. Solitaire calls it blasphemy (the DVD scene is called “Blasphemous Bond”). Then Bond fans his stacked deck, and Solitaire picks the Lovers. All of these are Fergus Hall.

By the way, Bond created a tarot deck of one card. That must mean he bought 78 decks. Quite an expenditure!

The Waite-Smith Reading
In the final tarot reading of the film, Solitaire has lost her virginity and her power, and Kananga tests her. The reading is huge, she lays out card after card, using most of the deck, and here we see the Waite-Smith tarot in use for the first time. Significantly, many of the cards used have not been seen before in the film.

The scene begins at 1:10:54 in “Unmasked Man and Plan,” and continues into “Solitaire/Death Card.” Bond is back in Big's hands, and will soon learn the truth of Big’s dual identity.

As the scene opens, Strength and Justice are visible on the table among fourteen cards. Later, I make out the Hanged Man, the World, Temperance, and the Wheel of Fortune. None of these were ever shown from the Fergus Hall deck, suggesting they had not yet been created.

Solitaire turns over a fifteenth card in response to Kananga's question, we don't see it.

When Baron Samedi enters, he picks up the High Priestess card from the reading and burns it. This card had previously been associated with Solitaire (albeit in a different form). He then turns over the Death card, and the camera zooms in.

Interestingly, these Waite-Smith cards have the red 007 back of the Fergus Hall cards. Strange that the filmmakers were willing to substitute radically different pictures on the fronts, but seemed to feel that a different back could not be tolerated.

The cards make an encore appearance at 1:39:58. Here Felix shows Bond three burned cards; Death, the High Priestess, and the Moon. They are all Waite-Smith cards with the red 007 back. This is definitely a goof, since Samedi burned only one card in the earlier scene.

Conclusion
Fergus Hall was unable to fulfill his commission, but his unusual illustrations were used anyway. He seems to have worked on the specific cards needed for the film, perhaps in order of the scenes (he may have been given the script to work with) and ran out of time. Working from a script, in order, explains why it is in the last scene that other cards must be substituted.

When it was time to publish a tie-in deck, Hall may have lost interest, or may have had other commissions. Regardless, he discarded his two illustrated sixes and instead created pip cards for the 40 numeric minors.

I'd have to consider the use of the 007 back a “goof,” even though it was clearly done on purpose. Seeing Bond's number on Solitaire's cards is certainly a bizarre way to break the fourth wall!

My vintage deck has 007 backs but a Tarot of the Witches box. This appears to be a mistake of some previous collector, who put the wrong deck in the wrong box; it was never published like this. Furthermore, red backs were never published.

The tarot cards that appear in Live and Let Die are absolutely unique. Nothing identical to them was ever published, making them one of the rarest of collectibles.

I could not have put this article together without the help of Bond collectible expert Matt Sherman, and Tarot author Mary K. Greer, as well as “Abrac” and “gregory” of TarotCollectors.com.

© 2011 Deborah Lipp