Mammon Demon: From a Word for Wealth to the Devil of Greed

Quick answer: The Mammon demon began as an ordinary Aramaic word, mamona, meaning wealth or property. Jesus uses it in Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13: 'You cannot serve God and mammon.' Because the saying treats wealth as a rival master, medieval Christian writers personified Mammon as a devil of greed, Peter Binsfeld assigned him to avarice among the seven deadly sins in 1589, and Spenser and Milton gave him a cave, a throne and a personality.

Related guides: demon names and their origins, what demonology is, Moloch, the demon of sacrifice, angels versus demons and their hierarchies, Beelzebub, lord of the flies, Belial, the worthless one.

What is the Mammon demon and what does the word mean?

Mammon is unusual among demon names because it started as a piece of everyday vocabulary. The Aramaic word mamona (Hebrew mamon) meant wealth, money or property, and it appears with that plain sense in the Mishnah and the Targums. Its root is probably the verb meaning ‘to trust’ or ‘to be firm’, so that mammon is literally ‘that in which one trusts’. The Gospels keep the word untranslated in Greek as mamonas, which is why English Bibles have ‘mammon’ rather than ‘money’.

The Mammon demon is what this word became when read as a proper name. Since Jesus set mammon opposite God as a master one might serve, Christian interpreters asked who this rival master was. By the Middle Ages the answer was a devil, and by the Renaissance a fully drawn character with a kingdom of gold. Modern lists of demons repeat the figure without noticing that scripture never describes him.

Understanding Mammon therefore means tracking a word through three stages: common noun, allegorical personification, and demon of the seven deadly sins. Each stage is documented in the sources, and the table above lays them out. For how this compares with other biblical names that followed the same route, see our guide to demon names and their origins.

Mammon in the Bible: Matthew and Luke

Mammon appears four times in the New Testament, all in sayings of Jesus. Matthew 6:24, in the Sermon on the Mount, reads: ‘No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and mammon.’ Luke 16:13 repeats the saying at the end of the parable of the dishonest steward, and Luke 16:9 and 16:11 use the phrase ‘the mammon of unrighteousness’ or ‘unrighteous mammon’ to mean worldly wealth as opposed to ‘true riches’.

None of these verses treats mammon as a spirit. The point of the saying is that money can command loyalty the way a master commands a servant, and that such loyalty competes with devotion to God. Luke’s ‘mammon of unrighteousness’ does not mean wealth is demonic; the parable actually tells the disciples to use wealth shrewdly to make friends. Many modern translations simply render the word as ‘money’ or ‘wealth’.

The Hebrew Bible has no Mammon at all. Searches for ‘Mammon in the Old Testament’ find only the related noun in later rabbinic texts, where mamon is a neutral legal term for property and damages. In other words, the biblical Mammon is a warning about an attitude, and the demon is a later interpretation of that warning.

How Mammon became a demon: church fathers, scholastics and the seven deadly sins

The personification began in preaching. Fourth-century writers such as Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom described wealth as a tyrant that enslaves, and Gregory went further, suggesting that Mammon was another name for Beelzebub. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate kept the word as mammona, and Augustine explained it as a Punic word for gain. The step from ‘wealth is a tyrant’ to ‘Mammon is a devil’ was short.

In the twelfth century Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the standard theology textbook of the medieval universities, stated plainly that riches are called by the Syriac name Mammon and that Mammon is the name of a devil. Thomas Aquinas and later commentators repeated the gloss. By the fourteenth century Mammon was a stock personification of greed in English allegory such as Piers Plowman, while Dante, preferring classical names, used Pluto to guard the circle of the avaricious.

The decisive classification came in 1589. The German bishop Peter Binsfeld, in his treatise on witches’ confessions, assigned a prince of hell to each of the seven deadly sins:

• Lucifer for pride
• Mammon for greed (avarice)
• Asmodeus for lust
• Leviathan for envy
• Beelzebub for gluttony
• Satan for wrath
• Belphegor for sloth

Binsfeld’s list spread through later demonologies and is the reason Mammon appears on every modern ‘seven deadly sins demons’ chart. For a wider view of how such systems were constructed, see what demonology is.

Mammon in Spenser, Milton and the Dictionnaire Infernal

Two English poets gave Mammon a body. In Book II, canto 7 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, meets Mammon as a sooty, hollow-eyed figure counting heaps of coin. Mammon calls himself ‘god of the world and worldlings’ and leads the knight through an underground realm of gold, offering him wealth, his daughter Philotime (Ambition) and the fruit of a golden tree. Guyon refuses everything and emerges faint but untempted.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) makes Mammon a fallen angel. In Book I he is ‘the least erected spirit that fell from Heaven’, who even in paradise kept his eyes on the golden pavement rather than on God. He leads the crew that digs ore from a hill in hell and builds Pandemonium, the demons’ palace. In the council of Book II he argues against war with Heaven and for making the best of hell, a speech that is a satire on worldly accommodation. Milton places him beside Moloch, Belial and Beelzebub; see our article on Moloch, the demon of sacrifice for his fiercer counterpart.

Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (1818; illustrated 1863) sums up the tradition: Mammon is the demon of avarice, and in the comic infernal bureaucracy that de Plancy borrowed from earlier satirists, hell’s ambassador to England. The 1863 edition did not give him one of Le Breton’s famous plates, so there is no canonical engraving of Mammon as there is of Moloch or Astaroth.

Mammon compared with other demons of sin and wealth

Mammon belongs to a family of figures that embody a vice or an abstraction rather than a place or a cult.

Belial

Belial, Hebrew for ‘worthlessness’, is likewise a noun turned person. In the Dead Sea Scrolls he is the leader of the forces of darkness; in the Goetia he is a king; in Milton he is the suave demon of lewd ease. Belial is the only one of these who entered the Solomonic grimoires.

Moloch

Moloch derives from a biblical cult and keeps a specific horror, child sacrifice, that Mammon lacks. Milton pairs them as the war-party and the peace-party of hell.

Pluto and Plutus

Classical Greek and Roman tradition separated Plutus, the blind god of wealth, from Pluto, lord of the underworld, though the two names blurred. Dante used Pluto as the guardian of the greedy, and Renaissance readers often treated Pluto and Mammon as equivalents.

Beelzebub

Beelzebub is a demonized Philistine god who in Binsfeld’s scheme governs gluttony. Gregory of Nyssa’s identification of Mammon with Beelzebub shows how early the two were linked as masters of appetite. Comparing these figures with the angelic orders they are said to have fallen from is the subject of angels versus demons and their hierarchies.

Common misunderstandings about Mammon

The most common error is that Mammon was a Syrian or Phoenician god of wealth worshipped in antiquity. No ancient temple, inscription or myth attests such a deity; the claim comes from early modern writers guessing at the word’s origin, and it was repeated by nineteenth-century encyclopedias. Mammon is a loanword, not a lost god.

A second error is that Mammon is in the Goetia. He is not among the 72 spirits of the Lesser Key of Solomon, nor in Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, nor in the Grand Grimoire. His career runs through sermons, theology and poetry, not through ritual manuals. A third confusion is between Mammon and ‘Mammonism’, a nineteenth-century word for the worship of money as a social system, which has nothing supernatural about it.

Finally, the capitalized, personified Mammon is sometimes read back into the Gospels so that Jesus seems to be naming a demon. The Greek text uses a lowercase common noun, and the context is about divided loyalty. Keeping the word and the demon separate is the key to reading every later source correctly.

Mammon in modern culture and why the name endures

Mammon survived because the saying that created him remains proverbial. Nineteenth-century critics of industrial capitalism, from Carlyle’s ‘Gospel of Mammonism’ to Ruskin and Marx, used the name for the money-worship of their age, and it still appears in sermons and editorials about greed. The figure is a convenient villain because he requires no theology; everyone understands a devil who is simply money with a face.

In fiction Mammon tends to be a scheming financier of hell. He is the antagonist’s power behind the scenes in the film Constantine (2005), where he is the son of Lucifer, a role invented for the screen. Comics, video games and animated series such as Helluva Boss cast him as a corporate demon of greed, usually with Binsfeld’s seven-sins scheme in the background. Tabletop games give him a layer of hell paved with gold, an image traceable straight to Milton.

For students of occult history Mammon is a clean example of how a demon can be manufactured from language alone. There was never a cult, a seal or a summoning; there was a word, a warning, and centuries of readers who wanted the warning to have a name.

How to read the Mammon sources for yourself

Start with the four Gospel verses in an interlinear or a translation with notes, and observe that the word is a noun. Then read Peter Lombard’s gloss in Sentences Book II and Binsfeld’s list, both available in translation or summary in histories of demonology. Spenser’s Cave of Mammon canto and Milton’s Book I lines on Mammon are short and worth reading in full; they are the real sources of the character.

When a website or video calls Mammon an ancient god or a Goetic spirit, check which of these stages it is drawing on and whether it cites anything earlier than the sixteenth century. Most do not. This site presents these beliefs as cultural and literary history, offers no ritual instructions, and makes no claims that any such figure exists or acts.

Disclaimer

This article traces Mammon through scripture, theology and literature as a matter of cultural history. Beliefs are described, not endorsed; no ritual instruction is given and no claim is made that any such being exists or acts.