It was one of W. B. Yeats's idler fantasies that A Vision might found a new Irish heresy, as disciples studied it and applied its doctrines (L712). In fact, even as he wrote this, he knew how few readers his work could realistically expect. In A Vision A, he had confined his audience, somewhat pessimistically, to his “old fellow students” in the Golden Dawn, and suggested that “if they will master what is most abstract there and make it the foundation of their visions, a curtain may ring up on a new drama” (CW13 lv; AVA xii). Later, when he came to write A Vision B, he had resigned himself to finding a solitary satisfaction; the symbols, he said, helped him “to hold in a single thought reality and justice” (AVB25).

Generally speaking, readers have been content to allow Yeats his petty triumph. Literary critics continue to read the book as Yeats gave them license to do, as “metaphors for poetry” (AVB8). So far, the only people who have taken up the challenge of applying the doctrines of A Vision have been astrologers seeking to enlarge their art. I shall briefly examine some of these later, but in order properly to assess the use to which these epigones have put A Vision, one first needs to see some of the ways in which the Yeatses tried to integrate astrology into the system with a possible view towards extending astrology's capabilities.

There are few traces of traditional astrology in the finished work, especially as concerns the individual. Several passages extant in A Vision B mention how the natal horoscope can twist, or rather enrich and complicate, the natural character of a person's phase (AVB 153, 176).