The two versions of A Vision(1925 and 1937) rather neatly coincide with Yeats's interest in authoritarian and proto-fascist policy, emerging most fully in his brief support of the Irish Blueshirts in 1933. In terms of Yeats's work, such an idea was posited by George Orwell in January 1943: “Those who dread the prospect of universal suff rage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.” In fact, a number of commentaries on Yeats's political liaison with right-wing fanaticism have emerged since Conor Cruise O'Brien's “Passion and Cunning” in 1965. Seamus Deane has commented that “Yeats's occult belief passes into his social and political beliefs.” Paul Scott Stansfield describes A Vision as “a deplorable venture” whilst Stephen Spender has suggested: “In the minds of writers who thought that their first obligation in their art was to keep open lines of communication with the dead, Fascism represented order, a return to the past tradition, opposition to Communism and social decadence.” Of course, Yeats's ventures into otherworldly study were frequent and remained a constant throughout his life. In Blood Kindred, W. J. McCormack suggests “underlying these interests and sympathies [in On the Boiler] was an occult philosophy that endorsed the irrational.” Theodor Adorno has also observed that “The appeal of anti-Semitism to insiders is its status as the ‘secret’ which explains everything and is available only to initiates. Like occultism and astrology, anti-Semitism is a paranoid projection of the ‘semi-erudite.’”

The nation and the occult coincide in Nazism in a way that, on the surface at least, recalls Yeats's conception of civilization in A Vision: Anthony Smith notes how “totalitarian controls and an almost ‘magical’ archaic symbolism transform nazism into a pseudomilitary- religious order, far removed from earlier nationalisms,” while in A Vision B, Yeats claims “A civilisation is a struggle to keep self-control.…The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation—the scream of Juno's peacock” (AVB268).