Mammon

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Mammon is wealth treated as a master one might serve instead of God. The word is Aramaic — māmōnā, meaning riches, money, or property — and it entered Christian vocabulary untranslated, carried straight into the Greek of the New Testament rather than rendered into it.

Its weight comes from a single saying, given in nearly identical form in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: no servant can serve two masters, for he will love the one and despise the other; “ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Luke sets the line at the close of the parable of the dishonest steward, where the phrase “mammon of unrighteousness” also appears. In the original these are ordinary words for money. What makes mammon a figure rather than a sum is the grammar of the saying itself: wealth is cast as a rival lord, something with a claim on a person’s allegiance, set opposite God as one master against another. The point is not that money is forbidden but that two loyalties of that kind cannot be held at once.

The capitalised personification — Mammon as a proper name — is largely the work of later readers. Early commentators sometimes glossed the word as the name of a demon or false god, though scholarship finds no evidence that any deity by that name was actually worshipped; the supposed pagan god of riches is a back-formation from the Gospel verse, not its source. Across the Middle Ages mammon was attached to the sin of avarice and folded into the moralists’ catalogues of vice. By the time it reaches Milton’s Paradise Lost, Mammon has become a character outright — the fallen angel who, even in heaven, walked with his eyes fixed downward on its golden pavement, and who in hell counsels his fellows to dig wealth from the ground rather than wage war. In the demonologies that systematised hell into ranks and offices, he takes his place as a prince of greed.

Two things are worth keeping apart. What the texts say is narrow: a warning that devotion to wealth competes with devotion to God, using a common word for money. What tradition made of it is larger: a named spirit, an idol, a presence behind the love of gain. The modern habit of writing “Mammon” with a capital letter, and meaning by it the whole impersonal power of money over human life, inherits both layers at once — the Gospel’s contest of masters and the later centuries’ demon — and tends to blur the line between them. The word has outlived every theology attached to it, which is part of why it still does work that none of those theologies intended.

→ Related: Golden Calf