The internal structure of the system elucidated in A Vision consists of an intricately woven series of theoretic concepts, tenets and terms. For this reason, when dealing specifically with the system's account of death, as set out in Book III of A Vision B entitled “The Soul in Judgment,” one is compelled to begin the study elsewhere. The same applies to the Four Principles, since they oversee the soul's progress through the six discarnate states. The most appropriate point of departure for a study of A Vision's account of death and the role of the Principles in the states between lives would be the system's description of life, and the activity of the Faculties.

According to the system's portrayal of life and death, the soul is subject to a purification or clarification process in the discarnate states. This idea is expressed in the poem “The Fool by the Roadside” as published in A Vision A: “When my days that have / From cradle run to grave / From grave to cradle run instead” (CW13181; AVA219). These lines appear to invert the traditional Western conception of the opposition between life and death. From the material perspective (subject to multiplicity, individuated consciousness and constrained perception) life ends with the death of the body, whereas from the transcendent point of view bodily existence is a limit imposed upon a perfected soul. Life can thus be regarded, according to the system of A Vision, as the contamination, imprisonment and confusion of a spirit that is, in its natural state, pure, free and fully illuminated. Material life is a kind of spiritual death, a rending of pure perfected transcendent consciousness. This is a fundamental postulate that regulates the opposition between life and death, materiality and spirituality, and the Faculties and the Principles. “It is because of the identification of light with nature,” Yeats explains, “that my instructors make the antithetical or lunar cone of the Faculties light [cradle to grave] and leave the solar dark [grave to cradle]. In the cone of the Principles, which operate after death, the solar cone is light [grave to cradle] and the other dark [cradle to grave], but their light is thought not nature” (AVB190).