Collage of “Offering to Molech” in “Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us” by Charles Foster in 1897 (left) and the 1909 painting “The Worship of Mammon” by Evelyn De Morgan (right) – in fairness, of the two here, Mammon looks the better deal as he’s giving something to his worshipper rather than the other way round – and a child at that – for Moloch

(5) MOLOCH & MAMMON

Yes – it’s another matched pair of villains from Biblical mythology but I just can’t resist them as an alliterative matching pair, one each from Old Testament and New Testament.

With variant spellings, Moloch “is a word that appears in the Old Testament several times, primarily in the Book of Leviticus”, usually to connote and condemn practices “which are heavily implied to include child sacrifice”.

Traditionally, Moloch has been understood to mean a Canaanite god to whom such sacrifices were made, although it has been argued to mean the sacrifice itself.

Whatever the case, “since the medieval period, Moloch has often been portrayed as a bull-headed idol with outstretched hands over a fire; this depiction takes the brief mentions of Moloch in the Bible and combines them with various sources, including ancient accounts of Carthaginian child sacrifice and the legend of the Minotaur”.

That’s for his visual iconography but Moloch has an enduring resonance as a metaphor for a monstrous force feeding on sacrifice for its own sake, particularly of children or innocents – imagining the future as a boot stamping on a child’s face forever, as it were.

Where Moloch has enduring resonance as a metaphor for sacrificial violence, his alliterative New Testament counterpart Mammon does so as metaphor for money or greed. The word is used by Jesus in two Gospels (Matthew and Luke) where he said “you cannot serve both God and Mammon”.

While Mammon has generally been understood to originate from a term for money, that term has been proposed to originate from “a Syrian deity, god of riches”, although no trace of such a Syrian deity exists. In any event, Mammon was soon personified as a demon of greed and he’s had quite the career in literary or popular culture ever since – most memorably for me in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where even as an angel in heaven before his fall, he was more interested in heaven’s pavements of gold.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)