Ideological Analysis and Religious Identity Constructs in the Arda Viraf Namah

Introduction
The Arda Viraf Namah, one of the foundational texts of Zoroastrianism during the Sasanian period, is a visionary account of the journey of the soul of Arda Viraf to the afterlife. Although this work appears to be a mystical and religious text on the surface, its historical and social context reveals signs of ideological and political function. This text was composed in the post-Alexander the Great era during the gradual revival of the Zoroastrian religious structure—a period when the Magi sought to consolidate religious authority and reconstruct the religious identity of the Zoroastrian community (Amozegar, 1993). "Furthermore, some scholars, including Assín Palacios, have pointed to the comparative potentials of the Arda Viraf Namah with texts such as the Divine Comedy; and Quentin Skinner has emphasized the significance of analyzing religious discourses in historical crises to elucidate the role of texts in reconstructing political legitimacy. These perspectives provide a framework for examining the Arda Viraf Namah not merely as a religious document but as a discursive text situated at the intersection of religion and power".
If you want, I can also provide a version with more formal academic language or adaptation according to a specific style.
Here is a specialized translation of the text incorporating Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge perspective:
"In this regard, the central question arises: Is the Arda Viraf Namah merely a religious-narrative text, or—as Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge theory suggests—is it a reflection of the efforts by religious elites to reproduce the dominant ideology in response to a crisis of legitimacy and intra-religious tensions? In addressing this question, this article relies on Mannheim's theory concerning the relationship between knowledge and social position to analyze the ideological content of the text."This translation adapts specialized academic language suitable for scholarly contexts, maintaining nuance from the original text.
Karl Mannheim argues that ideas, especially at the macro level, reflect the social positions and actions of dominant groups. From this perspective, the Arda Viraf Namah can be seen as a representation of an effort to consolidate the official interpretation of Mazdaism and to exclude dissenting readings.
In this analysis, concepts such as ideology, religious identity, legitimacy, and collective memory are considered as foundational cognitive categories. These concepts enable the explanation of the relationship between eschatological narratives and politico-religious power. The present analysis demonstrates how notions like heaven, hell, family, and ethics within the text are employed not merely as spiritual teachings, but rather as instruments for orchestrating religious meaning and exercising social control.
The necessity of this study lies precisely in this critical re-examination: understanding the Arda Viraf Namah not only as a theological text but also as a discursive document at the intersection of religion, ideology, and power is essential for comprehending the epistemic structure of ancient Iran.
 
Research Background
The text of the Arda Viraf Namah has attracted attention in various fields and has been studied from multiple perspectives. In the first category, several translations of this work have been published, among which the translations by Rashid Yasemi (1935), Afifi (1963), and Zhaleh Amuzegar (1993) stand out. These works mainly possess a linguistic and descriptive nature, focusing on conveying the content of the text into Persian, without engaging in theoretical analysis of the social contexts or ideological functions of the text.
In the second category, comparative studies have attempted to examine the Arda Viraf Namah alongside works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri’s Risalat al-Ghufran. Mahyar Alavi-Moghadam’s research (2010) presents a tripartite comparison of the Arda Viraf Namah, Risalat al-Ghufran, and the Divine Comedy, emphasizing the structural and thematic similarities of these three spiritual journeys. Moreover, Gardafarīn Mohammadi and Jalil Nazari (2008) in an article published in the Quarterly Journal of Comparative Literature explored a comparative study of the perspectives of these two Eastern texts (Arda Viraf Namah and Risalat al-Ghufran) regarding the afterlife. These studies primarily focus on analyzing narrative structures, common themes in the depiction of heaven and hell, and the examination of ethical concepts in spiritual journeys.
The distinctive approach of the present article is that, instead of narrative analysis or intertextual comparison, it addresses the social and intellectual context of the text’s production and endeavors to analyze the Arda Viraf Namah as a tool for reproducing the ideology of religious elites.
In the third category, analyses have been conducted from social, ethical, or political perspectives. Ali Rabie-zadeh, in his book "Arda Viraf Namah in the Balance of Critique" (2017), regards this text as a source for extracting historical information about the Sasanian era and examines its political, social, and economic content. Shoja Ahmadvand and Ruhollah Eslami, in their book on ancient Iranian political thought (2022), analyze the Arda Viraf Namah as part of ideological evidence serving the class structure of society. Furthermore, Ruholamini, in his book "Cultural and Social Manifestations in Persian Literature” (2000), introduces this work as reflective of the social structures, ethical norms, and value system of the Sasanian period.
In a more recent study, Fatemeh Mosayebi and Ruhollah Eslami, in their article "Dialectic of Ideology or Utopia in the Arda Viraf Namah" 2022, attempt a more theoretical analysis of the text’s nature situated between the poles of “ideology” and “utopia.” While this research aptly highlights the meaning-making dimensions of the work, it does not directly analyze the theoretical framework of sociology of knowledge or the connection between the Magi’s mental structure and their social position.
The common feature of most of these studies is that they have focused on the explicit and historical content of the text and have attempted to present a depiction of Sasanian society based on it. The fundamental difference of the present research from the aforementioned works lies in its theoretical perspective and level of analysis. This article, founded on an analytical-critical method, examines the Arda Viraf Namah not only as a historical source or a religious narrative but as a tool for the reproduction of ideological consciousness and legitimization of the Magi's discourse amid the crisis of the Sasanian period. This perspective enables an interpretation of the text within the framework of the interaction between the social status of religious elites, the discursive conditions of the era, and the process of consolidating religious-political authority—a methodological approach that has not been systematically pursued in earlier studies.
 
Methodology
The present research is grounded in the theoretical framework of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and engages in dialogue with selected historical perspectives, particularly the ideas of Quentin Skinner and Miguel Asín Palacios, aiming for a critical reading of the Arda Viraf Namah. This approach asserts that ideas and texts are not products of isolated individuals but are constituted within specific historical, discursive, and social contexts. From this perspective, the Arda Viraf Namah is not merely a mystical or religious narrative of the soul’s journey but must be analyzed as an ideological text—one that emerged amid the political and religious legitimacy crises of the Sasanian era and seeks to reestablish the nexus between religion and politics.
The present study is based on Karl Mannheim's theoretical framework of sociology of knowledge and engages in dialogue with certain historical perspectives, particularly the ideas of Quentin Skinner and Miguel Asín Palacios, to undertake a critical reading of the Arda Viraf Namah. This approach posits that ideas and texts are not products of isolated individuals but rather develop within specific historical, discursive, and social contexts. From this standpoint, the Arda Viraf Namah is not merely a mystical or religious narrative of the soul's journey, but must be analyzed as an ideological text—one that emerged amid the political and religious legitimacy crises of the Sasanian era and endeavors to reestablish the connection between religion and politics.
 
Conclusion
The Arda Viraf Namah can be understood as a multilayered text that emerged within the context of religious, cultural, and institutional crises of the Sasanian era and seeks to reconstruct a specific religious discursive stability and coherence. Analysis of this work through the lenses of Skinner, Palacios, and Mannheim reveals that it is not merely a report of a mystical revelation but carries an ideological representation aimed at consolidating the interpretive authority of the official religious institution against the religious diversity and fragmentation of its time.
This article endeavors to avoid a reductionist perspective that portrays the Arda Viraf Namah solely as a state-serving text and instead highlights the complexity of interaction among religion, identity, power, and social order. Based on the evidence presented, the text is not merely an instrument of the ruling authority but a institutionalized response to intra-religious crises and an effort to demarcate boundaries between legitimate and alternative interpretations of Zoroastrianism.
 
References
              

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