Kartir

Kartir began his career as an ordinary herbad, a low ranking priest, under Shapur I (r. 240 to 270), and by the reign of Bahram II, some four decades later, had accumulated titles that made him the effective head of the Zoroastrian priesthood across the Sasanian Empire. What is known of him comes almost entirely from his own words: four monumental inscriptions he had carved at Naqsh-e Rustam, Sar Mashhad, Naqsh-e Rajab and on the Kaba-ye Zartosht, each recounting his rise in his own voice and listing the offices he came to hold, among them mowbed of Ohrmazd and judge of the empire.

The inscriptions describe active religious enforcement rather than quiet devotion. Kartir records establishing fire temples across the empire and its conquered territories, strengthening the position of Zoroastrian priests, and suppressing rival religions and sects he names directly, including Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Nazarenes, Christians, Baptizers and Manichaeans, whose founder Mani was executed during this period. Zoroastrian orthodoxy in the third century Sasanian Empire is, to a significant degree, Kartir's own account of what he did to make it so, which is both the inscriptions' value and their limit: no independent Zoroastrian voice from the period survives to check his version against.

One of Kartir's inscriptions, at Sar Mashhad and again on the Kaba-ye Zartosht, departs from the record of offices held and describes a ritual journey. Kartir reports that he underwent a rite, apparently involving a double or a visionary journey of his own soul, in which he was shown the fates of the righteous and the wicked after death, crossing a hazardous passage compared in later Zoroastrian literature to the Chinvat Bridge, the span the soul must cross after judgment.

The account is fragmentary and its precise ritual mechanics are debated among specialists, but its content anticipates the fuller vision literature of later Zoroastrianism, above all the Arda Wiraz Namag, a Middle Persian text in which a chosen righteous man tours heaven and hell and reports what he saw for the instruction of the faithful. Mary Boyce and other historians of Zoroastrianism treat Kartir's account as the earliest attested example of this literary and ritual type in the tradition, written centuries before the surviving manuscripts of the later text. Because so little Sasanian era Zoroastrian writing survives outside inscriptions, Kartir's stone record is also one of the few points where a named individual's religious experience, rather than doctrine alone, can be read directly rather than reconstructed from much later redaction.