Kartir's Vision of the Other World

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.