Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel

Etching of Athanasius Kircher’s Tower of Babel, from his 1679 work Turris Babel.

The concept of the Tower of Babel is a timeless one, and throughout history it’s attracted the attention and imagination of myriad individuals. One such individual was Athanasius Kircher, a German scholar and polymath who lived from 1602-1680. His 1679 work Turris Babel explores the concept of building a tower that would reach heaven, and it was accompanied by a few etchings of such a building. The most striking one, pictured above, shows a needle-like design for the tower, complete with a spiraling ramp and Renaissance detailing throughout. The sheer proportions make this design impossible to build with the technology available at the time, but it still makes for a fascinating look. Kircher was aware of this, which may be why he threw aside reality to demonstrate how ludicrous the idea was.

Kircher’s Tower of Babel design is quite slender, with an exterior spiraling ramp that acts as a continuous setback along the entire height. Intersecting this ramp are eight flat terrace levels, numbered as such on the illustration. These terraces were most likely included to provide relief from the ramp’s relentless incline, which makes sense, but in the end they just interrupt the continuity of the spiral. The tower façade is lined with Italian Renaissance detailing, which includes Ionic pilasters and vertically-aligned porticos. My favorite part of the etching is the tiny human figure at the base of the structure, seemingly about to begin the formidable ascent laid out above him. At least the illustrator gave him a walking stick to assist in the climb.

Turris Babel was divided into three books, and only the second deals specifically with the tower. Throughout the book, Kircher spends many pages demonstrating how the task would be impossible, and the diagram shown below illustrates his reasoning. Kircher believed that to reach heaven, the tower would need to be twenty-five times the earth’s diameter in height. That’s just shy of 200,000 miles, or 321,000 km. According to him, this was the distance to the nearest heavenly body, the moon. A tower such as this would be so massive, he argued, that all the building materials in the world wouldn’t be enough to construct it. Furthermore, even if we somehow found the material, the sheer size of the tower would throw off the earth’s orbit and lead to the end of the world. Way to spoil the dream with science, Kircher.

Diagram from Athanasius Kircher’s 1679 work Turris Babel, showing the sheer scale of the tower in order for it to reach the moon. Kircher believed the distance to the moon was 25 earth diameters.

It’s interesting that Kircher felt the need to disprove the Tower of Babel concept. For the most part, legends and folk tales aren’t meant to be taken as fact, and in reality the story of the Tower of Babel made no claim that it was even possible. It just told the story that humanity tried to do it once, and God got angry and scattered them across the land. This is a testament to the timeless character of the story, and how it taps into the innate need for verticality that we all share. Kircher’s Turris Babel does a good job of stripping the allure away and attempting to kill it with simple truths, but even this can’t squash the dream of a tower so tall that it reaches the heavens.

Read more about the story of the Tower of Babel here.