Does the Tower of Babel Make a Cameo in Super Mario Bros. 3?
If I play a Final Fantasy, I expect world folklores and religions to be jumbled up, mashed into a fine paste and squozen out into an easy-to-digest epic adventure. In terms of the number of references racked up over the years, the Final Fantasy series is either the worst offender or greatest champion of this kind of thing, but other RPGs do it too. In fact many video games from other genres also mix and match, sometimes putting side by side things that otherwise would have kept a respectful distance. And every now and then the thing you’re surprised to come across in your video game happens to be religion.
The Super Mario games don’t touch religion all that often. There’s a bit about Japanese culture that a western gamer could learn by playing them, and there’s more than a few musical artists who lent their names to characters in the series. But because these games are generally lighter in tone than your average epic RPG and because Nintendo was and largely still is in the business of not offending religious people, you don’t find many churches, synagogues or mosques in the Mushroom Kingdom.
“Doy!” you may be saying. And I’d agree with you, if it wasn’t for the fact that the fifth world of Super Mario Bros. 3 seems to hide a reference to one of the most famous stories from Abrahamic scriptures: the Tower of Babel.
The fifth area of SMB3 is generally known as Sky Land or something thereabouts, and it’s unique in that it’s the only kingdom in the game to have two distinct phases. You start out on a green land mass that looks more or less like the first area, Grass Land, with the background music being one of the game’s many reggae-inspired tunes. Partway through, however, you transition to a map way up in the clouds, and the music is the same music you hear in SMB3’s “coin heaven” bonus stages. You’re not in the afterlife, exactly, but given the conceits of this series, you are in some kind of heaven.
In order to make that transition from the down-here to the up-there, you have to beat a level that is kind of unusual. For one thing, it’s a fortress-style level (with the fortress BGM) where you go outside at points, jumping from turrets onto clouds. What’s more, there’s neither a boss at the end nor a typical exit gate. You just hop into a pipe and the next thing you know, you’re on a new map screen up in the clouds. But even before you enter this level, you might be expecting a departure from the norm, because it has a unique map icon: a sort of spiral, as opposed to the blockier fortresses you see elsewhere on the map.
Super Mario Bros. 3 actually has very few unique map icons. In fact, I checked: Aside from the military vehicle stages and Bowser’s castle in the final world, there’s only this weird sky tower and then the pyramid stage in Desert Land. The pyramid makes sense in Desert Land, because it’s a very Egyptian style of desert that the game is trying to evoke. But it makes you wonder what the thinking was behind this odd-looking tower in Sky Land, which is not as instantly recognizable as representing a specific thing the way a pyramid is an obvious signal for all things Egyptian.
However, this weird sky tower icon is very much so supposed to be a reference to the Tower of Babel, if not the actual biblical tower outright. And I’ll explain why, but first I need to explain the story about this skyscraper of the ancient world. The Book of Genesis gets it done in nine sentences, but I think I can do better. Is that heretical?
Basically, people in a land called Shinar decide to work together to build a tower that goes all the way to heaven, and they’re actually accomplishing this incredible feat when God notices and decides that humans are actually working together too well. God therefore changed the world so that instead of all humans speaking the same language, they now speak a bunch of different languages. No longer working together so effectively, they abandon the tower project and set off to pursue their own goals. As it’s stated in the story, the land’s name is then changed to Babel, based off the word בָּלַל (bālal), which in modern Hebrew means “to mix or mingle” but in ancient Hebrew means “to confuse or confound.”
Yes, God gave the world multiple languages so we could achieve less. It makes me wonder if all the translation Fatimah and I do for this blog is just making God madder and madder with every new post, but let’s assume that’s not the case and press on anyway.
Now, the Bible version of this story does not state anything about how the tower looks — just that it was getting incredibly tall for the standards of the time. The appearance of the tower isn’t important to the telling of the story, because it’s only aiming to explain how humanity came to have multiple languages. However, in depictions of this story, artists incorporate specific architectural features that make it clear that they’re depicting *this* tower and not some other ancient tower.
Check out this rendition of the Tower of Babel drawn by Coenraet Decker for the 1679 book on the subject by Athanasius Kircher.
The spiral shape is unusual and distinctive. A person could walk in one direction and ascend all the way to the top.
In his woodcut illustration of the tower almost two centuries later, Gustave Doré also made it a spiralform structure.
The Bedford Hours, a fifteenth-century prayer book illustrated with scenes from the Book of Genesis, features a version of the tower that’s not cylindrical, exactly, but which does have a spiraling staircase wrapped around the building similar to how the previous two do.
Now, not every depiction of the Tower of Babel features this element. This 1594 painting by Lucas van Valckenborch the Elder, for example, styles the building as conical rather than a spiral. Its series of circular stories is very similar but it’s not as clear that the pathway spirals from one level to the next.
But the feature is particular enough to depictions of this one famous building that if you had only a limited means to express visually that a building was the Tower of Babel or was at least reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, this is what you would go with. In my opinion, that is the explanation for why the map screen icon for the Sky World tower looks the way it does. It is those spiral towers you saw in the above images, squished down to a 16 by 16 pixel square.
If you’re not aware of the artistic tradition of drawing the Tower of Babel this way, it doesn’t really affect your eventual takedown of Roy Koopa at the end of Sky World. But taking into account the one other example of a unique icon getting used in an overworld map is the pyramid stage in Desert Land, I can only conclude that the creative team behind Super Mario Bros. 3 making allusions to the wonders of the ancient world. I’m not sure why, and if there’s a third in here, I’ve completely missed it. Perhaps an earlier version of SMB3 had more of these — perhaps one per world? — and if anyone has ideas for what it could mean, I’m all ears.
There is one more thing, although it’s fairly outside the realm of video games. But if you’re curious as to why the Tower of Babel would be imagined with this spiral walkway design, there might actually be a reason, even if it turns the whole story on its head.
One theory for why this story exists at all goes back to Etemenanki, a real-life structure that once stood in Babylon, near what is today modern-day Baghdad. It’s estimated to have been constructed sometime between the 14th and 9th centuries BCE and was a ziggurat dedicated to Marduk, a Mesopotamian god who lines up more or less with the Greek Zeus. Etemenanki was ultimately demolished by Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, and although he intended to rebuild it, he died that same year. The structure never stood again.
As noted in this Livius.org article about Etemenanki, it’s noted by Herodotus in Histories that the structure did have a spiral staircase that people could use to climb to the summit.
It has a solid central tower, one stadium square, with a second erected on top of it and then a third, and so on up to eight. All eight towers can be climbed by a spiral way running round the outside, and about half way up there are seats for those who make the ascent to rest on. On the summit of the topmost tower stands a great temple with a fine large couch in it, richly covered, and a golden table beside it.
Good to know that there were rest stops along the way, but if Herodotus’s account is correct, then the staircase truly did exist, at least in the building that inspired the story, and it remained part of its design even if most people wouldn’t have made the connection between the Tower of Babel and this real-life structure, much less either of these and the Super Mario Bros. 3 location.
However, it’s thematically appropriate that these details would be confused over time, because the biblical version of Tower of Babel story might miss the point in a fundamental way. In the final sentences, the story seems to imply that God creating different languages is what inspired people to call the city Babel, but that’s not true. English does have a common noun babel, meaning “a confused mixture of sounds and voices, especially in different languages,” but that comes directly from this story in the way many Biblical terms become generic terms — jezebel, for example. But the place names Babel and Babylon (which can be used synonymously) come from the Akkadian bab-ilu, meaning “gate of god.” That bab word part, which means “gate,” shows up in a lot of place names in this part of the word, as Etymonline points out, including Bab-el-Mandeb, a dangerous strait between Yemen and Eritrea that literally means “gate of lamentation.” What’s really surprising about all this is that the English word babble seems to be wholly unrelated, even though it seems like a given that it must also come from this story. It doesn’t. Many languages have words similar to babble to refer to nonsensical talking — the odd etymology of barbarian comes to mind — but that most likely results from humans having a similar way of imitating the blah-blah-blah of meaningless speech. Thus, the Bible’s version of how Babylon got its name may be one big folk etymology.
In fact, in Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, he claims just that: The place name being similar to to a word meaning “confusion” made people create a story that linked Babylon’s name with a famously large structure there. And while Asimov doesn’t explicitly namecheck Etemenanki, he does make the point that certain details may remain the the story but become disconnected from their significance over time.
Miscellaneous Notes
This weird detour into ancient history came about because of a stray reference in the Halloween episode of the Nintendo Cartridge Society podcast. In it, the hosts talk about how the Sky Tower stage in Super Mario Bros. 3 is creepy and unsettling — and it is, especially when you misinterpet those pixelated hanging light fixtures as something more sinister. Their discussion got me thinking about the Tower of Babel connection, and it’s funny how these things work out.
Does anyone know the first usage of the term coin heaven? It occurred to me that at some point, we started calling the Super Mario bonus stages up in the clouds by this name, and I can’t figure out if it’s something that players were calling it and it caught on or if this was an official term that Nintendo taught us. I’m guessing it’s a fan-generated term, because as it appears in the first Super Mario Bros., this area seems less like a reference to the Christian afterlife than it does a riff on the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, where someone follows a magic beanstalk up into the clouds and finds riches.
Asking out of general curiosity, but also worth pointing out that long, long ago, I kept a Super Mario blog called Coin Heaven. It’s lost to time now, but there are traces of it here and there.
So if the Tower of Babel was inspired by Etemenanki, then Etemenanki must have been massive, yes? Well… Babylonian sources claim Etemenanki stood around three hundred feet tall, which even in the context of the ancient world does not seem so tall as to be an affront to God, I have to admit. I got a drink last week at the It’s a Living revolving restaurant at the top of the Bonaventure Hotel, which is 388 feet tall. It’s not even the biggest building in downtown L.A., and God has so far allowed it to remain. What’s more, modern historians estimate Etemenanki is even shorter than the estimates of its era — more at around 175 feet.
And finally, there is actually a Biblical reference in the name of a fairly popular Super Mario character: Dry Bones. In Japanese, the skele-Koopa is called Karon (カロン), which presumably comes from karakara (からから), a word with associations of dry clattering. Its English name, however, is an indirect reference to Ezekiel 37:1-6, often known as “The Valley of Dry Bones,” in which the prophet Ezekiel uses the image of desiccated skeletons coming to life as metaphor for the restoration of the Israelites.
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.”
That might seem like a fairly flimsy connection to make, but keep in mind that Dry Bones debuted in Super Mario Bros. 3, when many Mario enemies were named after elements from pop music. (The Koopa Kids excluding Larry and Morton, are named for singers, for example, and don’t forget that Boos technically debuted as Boo Diddly, a reference to the singer Bo Diddly.) Rather than being lifted directly from the Bible, Dry Bones’ name comes from the spiritual that is more popularly known as “Dem Bones” but is sometimes known as “Dry Bones” in reference to the story in the book of Ezekiel.
Today, I think kids learn it as the song that tells you how different bones are connected, but it has an origin that’s explicitly religious in nature.
