There’s a particular kind of excitement that comes with cracking open a new deck for the first time — that moment before the cellophane even hits the recycling bin when you wonder what the cards will say about you before you’ve said anything to them. Today I want to share that moment with you, because I just welcomed Caitlín Matthews’ Da Vinci Enigma Tarot into my practice, and its very first message to me was the Six of Air (Flowering).
If you haven’t encountered this one, the Da Vinci Enigma Tarot is a genuinely unique addition to any tarot shelf. Every card is drawn directly from Leonardo da Vinci’s own notebooks, sketches, and studies — soft line drawings set against parchment-toned backgrounds of grays, creams, and tans, as if the images themselves had been lifted straight from his workshop. Matthews organizes the 78 cards into a Macrocosm (the Major Arcana, representing the greater archetypal world) and a Microcosm (the Minor Arcana, the lesser, everyday manifest world) — and instead of the traditional suits of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, this deck speaks in the elemental language of Water, Earth, Air, and Fire.
It’s less a tool for quick, snap readings and more an invitation into a mind — Leonardo’s mind — as it wrestled with proportion, invention, anatomy, and the sacred harmony between the human and the universal. Pulling from it feels less like drawing a card and more like opening a very old, very wise notebook and asking it a question.
For a first pull, I like to keep the question simple: what do I need to know right now? The card that surfaced was the Six of Air, subtitled Flowering.
In most traditional systems, the Air suit maps to the mind, thought, and communication — the realm where our mental patterns either trap us or set us free. A Six in this family (echoing the Six of Swords across other decks) traditionally speaks to movement after difficulty: leaving turbulent waters behind and rowing steadily toward calmer shores. What strikes me about Matthews framing this particular Six as Flowering is the shift in emphasis. This isn’t just passage or escape — it’s growth that follows the passage. It’s the blossom that only opens once you’ve actually put the storm behind you.
That feels remarkably apt as a first message from a deck built entirely from Leonardo’s own studies of natural form — his botanical sketches, his obsessive attention to how a bud unfurls, how a river bends, how proportion resolves itself into beauty over time. The Six of Air (Flowering) isn’t telling me the difficulty is still ahead. It’s telling me that whatever mental clarity or hard-won peace I’ve been rowing toward is now ready to open — to flower — into something visible.
As an opening card, I couldn’t have asked for a better welcome. It sets a tone of quiet forward motion rather than upheaval, and it hints that this deck is going to lean into growth-through-process rather than drama-for-drama’s-sake — very fitting for a deck rooted in the mind of a man who spent decades patiently observing how nature builds itself, one careful sketch at a time.
I’m looking forward to spending more time with the Da Vinci Enigma Tarot and seeing how its elemental language of Water, Earth, Air, and Fire reshapes some of the readings I’ve grown used to doing with more traditional suits. If this first pull is any indication, it’s going to be a deck that rewards patience — much like its muse.
Have you worked with the Da Vinci Enigma Tarot, or any of Caitlín Matthews’ other decks? I’d love to hear your first-pull stories in the comments.
