The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, synthesising its system in the late nineteenth century, adapted Vayu into a blue circle, one of five coloured meditation cards that form a Western practice separate from the tattva's original place in Indian philosophy. The circle's continuous, unbroken line was chosen to evoke air's constant movement and its lack of any fixed boundary, in contrast to the square's fixed corners.
In Golden Dawn method the practitioner gazes at the painted circle until an afterimage forms, then holds the image with closed eyes as a focus for meditative or visionary exploration linked to the element; later occult currents that inherited Golden Dawn material, including some Thelemic practitioners, continued the technique largely as designed.
This gazing practice is a later Western construction built on borrowed vocabulary, and it should be read on its own terms rather than as a window into Vayu's role within its own tradition, where the tattva names the principle of movement and touch behind breath, circulation and the nervous impulses, a physiological and cosmological category with no original connection to a painted card. Describing both uses together, without collapsing one into the other, keeps each tradition's claim distinct.