Who is the God "Mammon"?

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billd89
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Who is the God "Mammon"?

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Luke 16:13 in the context of 16:1f
11So if you have not been faithful with worldly wealth, who will entrust you with true riches?
12And if you have not been faithful with the belongings of another, who will give you belongings of your own?

13No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon {μαμωνᾷ}.”


Matthew 6:24
"No one can serve two masters: Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon."

Against modern theologians who want to re-affirm a false monotheism in the 1st C., I will treat this as a Two-Power thesis. Mammon is an Antithesis of God, logically not merely and much more than a concept (e.g. way of life) but veritably a God ... of Fortune: (negatively) the deviant Cosmocrator who jealously rewards selfish/materialist motives? That might fit Ialdabaoth, no?

What are all the references to this god and where was He/It worshiped exactly? Search does not quickly identify any such deity, anathema in any case (like the Baals). Wiki tells us that "Gregory of Nyssa also asserted that Mammon was another name for Beelzebub," but that citation is somewhat ambiguous regarding exact correspondence. Though St. Gregory used both terms: must they be the same god? otoh, we know Horon is Baal-zeboul, Agathodaimon, etc. That deity was probably a relic (if otherwise repressed, fading) 'God of Fortune' for Semitic merchant-sailors and throughout the Diaspora c.100 AD. And we see, from more recent archaeological evidence in Israel, Horon accepted offerings of Gold. Did Horon accept Gold as Osiris accepted turquoise, as the mineral blood of that god perhaps?

C.J Bleeker, Historia Religionum: Religions of the Past , Vol. 1 [1988], p.205:
Hōrōn is a Canaanite deity known from personal names and place-names from ca.1900 down to ca.600 B.C. The Book of Joshua mentions two places called Beth-Horon (Horon's house, or temple), a prince by the name of Haurān-abum 'Horon is Father’ is cursed in an Egyptian text from the 12th C. BC. Egyptian texts mention Horon together with Reshef and the goddess ‘Anat. He is invoked in a curse by Keret in a Ugaritic text and in a Phoenician incantation from Arslantash (7th C. BC). He is also known as the patron of the city of Jamnia, and an ostracon found just north of Tel Aviv mentions “gold for Horon’s temple”. He is supposed to have been a chthonic deity, but there is no certain evidence for this.

Plato (Phaedrus 274a?) said the secret and invisible creative power supreme (i.e. Logos) among the Egyptians was called Ammon: "the hidden one," "invisible," "mysterious of form," considered "Lord of All"; and Plutarch, that the term signified "hidden." Ammon was also linked with Jupiter (as Herodotus noted, c.400 BC), the god of wealth, and money-loving (as St. Augustine noted, c.425 AD). Furthermore, Gray (1957) provided linguistic evidence supporting the idea that Horon = Jupiter (c.50 BC). So the Semitic god God 'Horon' (c.1900 down to ca.600 BC) was assimilated to the Libyan-Egyptian god 'Ammon' (c.600-400 BC), this deity was even later understood as Jupiter (the money-lovers' god). Can μαμωνᾷ be a corruption of Ἄμμων, by some convolution over five centuries and 500 miles distance?

Aristeas 1.16: They worship the same God, the Lord and Creator of the Universe, as all other men, as we ourselves, O king, though we call him by different names, such as Zeus or Dis [Ζῆνα καὶ Δία].

The Alexandrian 'Dis' was Homer's Zeus Katachthonios (c.700 BC), corresponding to and Ovid's Jupiter Stygius (c.10 AD), Tartareus, Infernus, Niger, etc. Likewise, The Philistines' chthonic 'Horon' would also be a nemesis of the Sky God and readily understood as Satan (=Beelzebub) just a few centuries later. I have previously suggested that in the Semitic Delta (Siriad), Horon was already known as Baal Zephon (= Zeus of Kasios), c.250 BC. In that period of the OT, Baal Zephon was almost certainly analogous if not identical to Baal-Zeboul. Where Horon is demonstrably a god of Darkness, Matthew 6:23 conveniently qualifies how Mammon generalized is Darkness, Wealth-striving is Idolatry ('worship of the Baals'), etc.

Zeus Meilichius (or Jupiter Meilichios) was a chthonic Zeus and Serpent deity associated w/ Agathodaimon.

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