Air

Vayu is the air tattva, one of the five gross elements of the Indian scheme, the principle of movement, motion and touch, the moving air, the breath, the wind. In the classical analysis air is associated with the sense of touch and with all that is mobile and dynamic; in the subtle physiology it is linked to the region of the heart and to the vital breath, the prana that circulates through the body. The tattvas are the elemental principles of the Samkhya and Tantric metaphysics of India, arranged from the subtle ether down to dense earth, each with its sense and its subtle root.

Air passed into Western occultism through Rama Prasad's Nature's Finer Forces of 1890 and the Golden Dawn, which used the tattva emblems, air shown as a blue circle, for meditation and scrying from 1888. That Western adoption is modern; the air tattva itself, and its attributes of motion and touch, are part of the ancient Indian doctrine of the elements.

Sources Classical Samkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and MeaningGerald James Larson with Nature's Finer Forces: The Science of Breath and the Philosophy of the TattvasRama Prasad

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.