Demonic · Infernal Court · c. 80 CE
Mammon
Also called Mamon, Mammona
Wealth personified. The gospels use the word for money itself; demonology turned the metaphor into an officer of hell.
![Historical depiction of Mammon — Evelyn De Morgan — [1]](/entities/mammon.jpg)
Well sourced
'Ye cannot serve God and mammon' is a statement about divided loyalty, using an Aramaic word for riches. There is no demon in the sentence. But the rhetorical structure — mammon as a rival master — was too suggestive to leave alone, and by the medieval period Mammon is a named prince of hell and the demon of avarice in the seven-sins schemes. Milton gives him the best characterisation: the least erected spirit that fell, who even in heaven looked downward at the golden pavement rather than up.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Aramaic *mamon*, which Klein glosses simply as wealth or money. That is the whole of it: the word names property, it is a common noun in the Aramaic of the period, and the gospel saying sets it against God as a rival claim on loyalty rather than as a rival being. No text makes it anybody's name. The demon is a later reading of a metaphor, and the corpus records the reading on this page while keeping the word's own meaning here.
Where it was actually worshipped
None, and the joke is that this is the point: he is wealth personified, so the counting-house is his temple and nobody had to build one.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- New Testament · c. 50–110 CE
- Named there as
- mammon
- Rank
- Prince
- Order
- Infernal Court
- Base of operations
- None, and the joke is that this is the point: he is wealth personified, so the counting-house is his temple and nobody had to build one.
- Era
- c. 80 CE
- Traditions
- Christian, Folk & Demonological
Traits
- Domain
- Avarice, riches, mining
- Capital sin (Binsfeld, 1589)
- Greed — A word for wealth in the gospels, made into a person by the time Binsfeld writes.
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Mammon, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- divination1
- material1
- malefic1
4 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 4 texts that names Mammon, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
4 texts spanning roughly 1,783 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as mammon, Mammon
- Rank: given as Not an entity — a word for wealth; Fallen angel; Demon of avarice
Used as the rival master to God in a saying about divided service.
“Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
Named as the demon of greed in Binsfeld's assignment of one spirit to each capital sin.
Directs the mining of hell's gold and the building of Pandemonium; counsels peace and industry over war.
“Mammon, démon de l’avarice : c’est lui, dit Milton, qui, le premier, apprit aux hommes à déchirer le sein de la terre pour en arracher les trésors.”Mammon, demon of avarice: it was he, says Milton, who first taught men to tear open the breast of the earth to wrench the treasures out of it. — translated for ColossiansOne
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
The Nine Infernal Orders
9. Tempters
Headed by Mammon. Opposed to the Angels.
The Infernal Court
Great Officers → Mammon
Demon of avarice.
The Seven Princes and the Deadly Sins
Greed
A word for wealth in the gospels, made into a person by the time Binsfeld writes.
The Deliverance Taxonomy
Named from a cult → Mammon
A word for money in the gospels.
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
The clearest case in this corpus of a common noun becoming a person by not being translated. Aramaic *mamon* means wealth; the gospel saying sets it against God as a rival claim on loyalty; and because English versions kept the word rather than rendering it, readers met a name where the original had a noun. Milton then gave him a character — the fallen angel with his eyes on the gold of heaven's pavement — and medieval preaching had already made him the prince of avarice. The Aramaic is still doing duty as an English word for money, which is where the whole thing started.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Mammon?
Is Mammon the same as The Preta?
What rank is Mammon?
How else is Mammon spelled?
What is Mammon said to do?
How old is Mammon?
Nearest in the corpus
If Mammon is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Beelzebub
Prince · Infernal Court
'Lord of the Flies' — a Philistine god of Ekron whose name was almost certainly deformed as a Hebrew insult, then inherited by Christian demonology as the second power of hell.
Moloch
Prince · Infernal Court
The deity of the Tophet child sacrifices in Kings and Jeremiah — or, on a long-running scholarly reading, the name of the sacrifice itself rather than a god.
Belphegor
Prince · Infernal Court
The Moabite Baal of Peor, reassigned by demonology as the demon of sloth and of ingenious inventions. A god turned into a joke about laziness.
Orobas
Prince · Goetic Spirit
Singled out in the Goetia as faithful and honest — he does not tempt or deceive, and he defends the operator against the other spirits, which no other entry promises. He discourses on divinity and the creation of the world.
Sitri
Prince · Goetic Spirit
A griffin-winged leopard's head that resolves into a very beautiful man. His single office is compulsion in desire, running in both directions, and the Goetia is explicit that it extends to making its objects strip.
Stolas
Prince · Goetic Spirit
His teaching is narrow and exact — astronomy, and the properties of herbs and precious stones — with none of the wars, treasures or transformations that crowd the entries around him. He comes as a mighty raven, then a man.
The books behind Mammon
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
New Testament
Various · c. 50–110 CE · Koine Greek
Read New Testament in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Wikimedia file page
Tractatus de Confessionibus Maleficorum et Sagarum
Peter Binsfeld · 1589 · Latin
Read Tractatus de Confessionibus Maleficorum et Sagarum in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Unknown author · Wikimedia file page
Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667 · English
Read Paradise Lost in full ↗Cover: Public domain · John Milton · Wikimedia file page
Dictionnaire Infernal
Jacques Collin de Plancy · 1818; illustrated ed. 1863 · French
Read Dictionnaire Infernal in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Collin de Plancy · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.