In the late nineteenth century the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn adapted Prithvi into a yellow square, one of five coloured shapes built into a system of meditation and scrying cards that stands apart from, rather than continues, the tattva's original role in Indian philosophy. The square's four equal sides and solid colour were chosen to evoke earth's stability and resistance to change, the densest and most fixed of the five forms in the set.
Golden Dawn method has the practitioner gaze at the painted square until an afterimage forms, then hold that image with closed eyes as an entry point into meditative or visionary states linked to the element; the practice passed largely intact into later currents that drew on Golden Dawn material, including some Thelemic practitioners who kept the same five shapes and colours.
The card practice is a distinct Western invention that borrowed Prithvi's name and elemental associations to build a new visual technique, and it should not be read back into the tattva's own tradition, where Prithvi names the densest of the five gross elements, tied to smell and to the body's solid structure, a physiological and metaphysical category rather than an object built for gazing meditation.