Few words have traveled further from their origins than 'mammon.' Beginning as a common Aramaic noun - mamona, meaning wealth, property, or money - it passed through the teaching of Jesus into Greek, Latin, and eventually English, where it was transformed from a noun into the name of a deity and finally into a synonym for the corrupting power of money itself.
The key moment occurs in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 6:24 records Jesus declaring: 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' The statement is stark and binary: there are two masters, and they are irreconcilable. Luke 16:13 repeats the saying almost verbatim in a different context. In both passages, Jesus personifies mammon - treating it not as neutral property but as a competing allegiance, a rival lord. The Aramaic word he used was familiar to his audience as everyday vocabulary for possessions, but his rhetorical move was to elevate it to the status of a false god demanding worship.
The step from personification to deity was short. Early church fathers began writing about Mammon as if it were an actual demonic figure. By the Middle Ages, Mammon appeared in lists of the seven princes of Hell, assigned to rule over greed. Dante in the Inferno does not name Mammon directly, but the usurers and hoarders of Canto VII are presided over by a spirit of material accumulation that echoes the biblical teaching precisely.
Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) made the transformation complete. In Book I, Mammon is one of the named fallen angels, the one who, even before his fall, was more interested in Heaven's gold pavements than in God: 'Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell / From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks and thoughts / Were always downward bent, admiring more / The riches of Heav'n's pavement, trodden gold, / Than aught divine.' Milton's Mammon is a brilliant figure: the angel of practicality and material improvement in Hell, the spirit who argues that they should make the best of their situation, build their own civilization, mine the infernal wealth. His speech in Book II is disturbingly reasonable, which is precisely the point - the temptation of mammon is that it always sounds sensible.
From Milton the word passed into English as a personification of material greed in any context. 'Mammon' in modern usage names not just personal greed but systemic materialism: the worldview that measures all value in money. 'Mammonism' appeared as a term in Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843), where he attacked industrial capitalism as a religion of pure profit. 'The gospel of mammonism' became a Victorian shorthand for the ideology that subordinated all human relationships to economic calculation.
The phrase 'serving mammon' retains biblical force in contemporary discourse. When economists, ethicists, or preachers argue that market logic should not be the final arbiter of human value, they frequently reach for the mammon vocabulary - whether or not they are aware of its Aramaic origin. The word has moved from Jesus's street preaching in first-century Galilee to Milton's theological epic to Carlyle's social criticism to modern corporate ethics debates, always carrying the same charge: there are things that money cannot and should not buy.