In all, the Yeatses assigned roughly 120 historical people, family, and personal friends to a phase at some point in the automatic script, the notes, or in A Vision itself, along with a dozen groups of people (e.g., grammarians, travelers, journalists), and another dozen fictional, mythological, or artistic figures (e.g., the Idiot of Dostoyevsky, Giraldus, Cuchulain, Rodin's Eternal Idol). A few of these changed over the course of the script or were revised by the Yeatses. Ezra Pound, for instance, was moved from the heroic Phase 12, when Yeats saw his pity for the stray cats of Rapallo.

In A Vision, Yeats attributes almost fifty historical personages to their phases in the headnotes for the phase descriptions. Added to these, there are vague multitudes of beautiful women and one fictional character, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Yeats further refers to a number of people and fictional characters in the text of these descriptions, adding almost ten more names and more beautiful women.

Over fifty further names were mentioned in the automatic script, mainly in scripts from December 1917 and early January 1918. In separate notes, the Yeatses put the names into an ordered list bringing together most of these attributions, together with cycle of incarnation in many cases, introducing a few changes. Most of the cancelled names, however, seem to be caused by copying a name to the wrong phase number in the first instance.

The list is on two loose leaves. I consulted the first on the microfilm of Yeats manuscripts from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. The top part of the page lists the attributions of “E[vil] G[enius]” given on January 3, 1918 (see YVP1 192), with the numbers from 18 to 28, but filled in only as far as 20 where the automatic script stopped. The list of people starts halfway down the page and is headed “Phases.” with names for Phases 2 to 9 in George Yeats's hand. The second sheet, also in George Yeats's hand, covers Phases 10 to 25; it was filed with the automatic script of June 2, 1918, and is published in Yeats's “Vision” Papers (YVP1 549n5) and also in The Making of Yeats's “A Vision,” Appendix B (MYV2 418).