Mammon

Mammon does not begin as a being either. In Aramaic, māmōnā simply means «goods», «property», «what one owns», and it is the ordinary word for somebody's money. It appears in the Gospel of Matthew 6:24 and in Luke 16:13 within a single sentence of Jesus: no one can serve two masters, you cannot serve God and mammon. The sentence works because it personifies at a stroke a thing that is not a person, exactly as if one said today that someone serves money; it is a figure of speech, and its force lies precisely in the hearer knowing that money is nobody. What turns the figure into a character is an accident of translation. Neither the Greek of the New Testament nor Jerome's Latin Vulgate translated the word: they transcribed it as it stood, mamonae, and a foreign word that appears untranslated in a sacred text, capitalised by the copyists, ends up being read as somebody's name. Everything else follows from there.

He is often credited with a precise portrait, taken from Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal: face of a dog or wolf, red eyes, twisted horns, tilted scales, serpents coiled around heaps of coins. None of that is there. The complete entry in that book, in the illustrated sixth edition of 1863 that everyone cites, says this and only this: «Mammon, demon of avarice: it is he, says Milton, who first taught men to tear open the breast of the earth to wrench treasures from it.» One sentence, with no physical description of any kind, and referring the reader to a seventeenth-century poem. What does have an iconographic tradition is something else, and it comes from medieval art: Avarice is painted as a well-dressed man with a purse of coins hung round his neck, which is the weight that drags him to hell. And in Dante's Comedy, cupidity has the shape of a she-wolf, the lean beast that bars the pilgrim's way in the first canto and that, says the poet, «after feeding is hungrier than before».

That Mammon should be specifically the demon of avarice, and not just any demon, he owes to an auxiliary bishop of Trier called Peter Binsfeld, who in 1589 published a treatise on the confessions of warlocks and witches. In it he shared out the seven deadly sins among seven demons, and the distribution has stuck: pride to Lucifer, avarice to Mammon, lust to Asmodeus, wrath to Satan, gluttony to Beelzebub, envy to Leviathan and sloth to Belphegor. It is worth setting this down carefully because it circulates jumbled, with gluttony and pride swapped or with sloth attributed to Baal, who is not on the list. And it is worth saying too that Mammon does not appear in the conjuring handbooks. He is not among the sixty-nine spirits of Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum nor among the seventy-two of the Ars Goetia, although he is often cited in both. He was never a demon summoned with a seal: he was always a moral category.

The portrait that has really fixed his figure is Milton's, in «Paradise Lost» of 1667, and it does not look like a king of hell. There Mammon is «the least erected spirit that fell from heaven», and the poet explains why: even when he was above, he walked with downcast eyes, admiring heaven's golden pavement more than anything else divine. Fallen, he does the only thing he knows how to do: he leads his own to break open the crust of hell's floor, to draw out the metal and smelt it, and with that they raise Pandemonium, the palace where the demons assemble. In the council he speaks third, after Moloch and Belial, and his proposal is not war but staying: he argues that hell can be made habitable if they work at it, that it is better to reign there than to plead above. That is exactly the sentence of the Dictionnaire Infernal, which points to Milton and to no grimoire. And that is, two hundred and fifty years later, the fat and richly dressed man clutching a fistful of coins.

It is very often repeated that Mammon was originally a Phoenician or Syrian god of wealth, worshipped with temples and priests, and that Christianity later demoted him to a demon, as it did with Baal or Astarte. The claim has the shape of a fact and is not one. There is no inscription, no temple, no god-list of the ancient Levant, no tablet from Ugarit or Palmyra in which a god so named appears. What there is, is an ordinary Semitic word for money, documented in Aramaic, in rabbinic Hebrew and in Punic, and nothing else. The idea of the Syrian god spreads through the mythological dictionaries of the nineteenth century, which reasoned backwards: since a demon of that name already existed, a divine past was assumed for him and a homeland was sought. This being's own case refutes it, and almost elegantly: Mammon is precisely the opposite of a demonised god. He is a word promoted.