he shall leane to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and riches.
A marginal gloss to “riches” says, “This word is a Syrian word, and signifieth all things that belong to money.” “Riches” is a translation of the Syriac “mamonas,” and in the King James version, the word appears not as “riches” but as “Mammon.” The OED cites John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563): “Thys wycked Mammon, the goodes of thys worlde, whyche is their God.” When Thomas Becon defines the enemies of humankind–the devil, the flesh, and the world – in his Catechisme (included in his 1564 Worckes), he identifies “the world” with Mammon:
All folowe the worlde, which both with his pleasures and richesse doothe so entangle menne in thys oure age, that he seemeth to raygne alone lyke a God. All folowe the worlde, even from the higheste to the lowest, from the kyynge to the subiecte … They are all Mammonistes and world-linges.
(Becon, 415)
Spenser’s Mammon introduces himself as “God of the worlde and worldlings …/Great Mammon, greatest god below the skye” (2.7.8), a reference to this homiletic tradition, but Spenser’s allegory also allows for an understanding of Mammon as the spirit of the global transmission of wealth.
John Dee, in his General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577), also refers to Mammon as a personification of economic misbehavior. In that text, Dee lays out a program for global navigation, expansion, and trade to be based on the nationwide sponsorship of a royal navy that would maintain a secure environment for commercial expansion and venturing. According to Dee, such a national project would circulate and bring home wealth by means of foreign trade and the opening of new markets. Dee contrasts his project with an opposing form of economic behavior that he says is harming and holding back “the weal-Publik of England” (33). Because they do not engage in beneficial exchange, those who bring dearth to the commonwealth by their hoarding of wealth and speculation in commodities are called “Mammon’s dearlings” (33). Dee describes the “Carefull freend, and doting louer, of wicked Mammon” whose wealth and goods are “only, for his most Priuate Gaynes sake, to be Bagged, or Chested vp, for his Idoll, to behold or Delight in, As in his strength, and furniture: ready to mainteyn hym, in other wicked purposes” (33). Dee’s Mammon is the god worshipped by the hoarder, the encloser, the monopolist, and the primitive accumulator; so is Spenser’s Mammon, but Spenser supplements the traditional meaning of Mammon used by Dee. The Mammon of Spenser’s allegory embodies a paradox that links the local hoard or domestic accumulation to a global circulation system.
The opening stanzas of Book II, Canto 7, associate Guyon’s knightly quest with new world exploration: first Guyon is compared to a navigating pilot making his way across the sea and then to a European explorer arriving the New World, “he traveild through wide wastfull ground,/That nought but desert wildernesse shewed all around” (2.7.2). There, in a “gloomy glade,” the knight of Temperance encounters “An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight” whose “face with smoke was tand” (2.7.3). Mammon is “Of grisly hew, and fowle ill favour’d sight” (2.7.3), and he wears a rusty “yron coate … enveloped with gold.” This coat appears “to have beene of old/A worke of rich entayle, and curious mould,/Woven with antickes and wild Imagery” (2.7.4). One possible reading of the figure of Mammon might interpret him as an Amerindian living in the forest and adorned in the ornate garb of a chieftain or shaman. He is counting a “masse of coyne” when Guyon stumbles upon him,
And round about him lay on every side
Great heapes of gold, that never could be spent:
Of which some were rude owre, not purifide
Of Mulcibers devouring element;
Some others were new driven, and distent
Into great Ingoes, and to wedges square;
Some in round plates withouten moniment;
But most were stampt, and in their metal bare
The antique shapes of kings and kesars straunge and rare.
(2.7.5)
Mammon’s gold is an inexhaustible resource: it “never could be spent” both in the sense that it is seemingly limitless in quantity and that it is being hoarded and kept out of circulation. It also takes many shapes and forms, its “bare” metal bearing the mark of the many different rulers who have tried to put it to use as both a symbol and a resource to enhance their worldly power. These royally minted coins form a kind of ruin, a nasty pile heaped in a foul dark place, a hoard that attests to the efforts of “kings and kesars” to stamp their identities on the world of matter. In a lifeless heap, these coins figure the wealth employed by the rulers of kingdoms and empires throughout the world, and their minting of a royal coinage that would assert identity and nation, now indiscriminately mingled together to form an international “masse.”
Guyon cannot imagine where Mammon can “safely hold/So huge a masse, and hide from heaven’s eye” (2.7.20), and he questions Mammon: “What art thou …/That here in desert hast thine habitaunce,/And these rich heapes of wealth doest hide apart/From the world’s eye, and from her right usaunce?” (2.7.7). Guyon’s desire to “see” and “know” the “secret place” that is the source of Mammon’s gold is what initially draws him into the cave. Guyon does not desire to possess the gold, but he wants knowledge of its origin, its production, and most importantly its global circulation.
They forward passe, ne Guyon yet spoke word,
Till that they came unto an yron dore,
Which to them opened of his owne accord,
And shewd of richesse such exceeding store,
As eye of man did never see before;
Ne ever could within one place be found,
Though all the wealth, which is, or was of yore,
Could gathered be through all the world around,
And that above were added to that under ground.
The charge thereof unto a covetous Spright
Commaunded was, who thereby did attend,
And warily awaited day and night, From other covetous feends it to defend, Who it to rob and ransacke did intend. Then Mammon turning to that warriour, said; Loe here the worldes blis, loe here the end, To which all men do ayme, rich to be made: Such grace now to be happy, is before thee laid.
(2.7.31–32)
The so-called Cave of Mammon is compared to “an huge caue,” but it is really a vast mine, “hewne out of rocky clifte” (2.7.28). The gold in Mammon’s mine is the hellish equivalent of El Dorado, of what Raleigh called “El madre del oro (as the Spaniards term them) which is the mother of gold” – it is the great source of precious metal that Raleigh hoped to find in the hidden empire of Manoa, a hoard bigger than the Peruvian mother lode.
When offered these riches, Guyon refuses, declaring that he would rather “be Lord of those, that riches have,/Then them to have my selfe, and be their servile sclave” (2.7.33). Through Guyon’s rejection of the mother lode fantasy, Spenser suggests that there is a higher power that is capable of commanding those who have wealth, a power that could operate without being tainted by desiring or possessing metal or coins in a direct way. Guyon’s refusal of Mammon’s gold invokes this fantasy of a feudal power that could function by means of mutual obligation rather than by participation in the marketplace and its values.19 But this social order was already passing away in Spenser’s day. Cicero’s aphorism, that “A limitless supply of money forms the sinews of war,” was increasingly valid. Money, supplied by bankers and creditors as well as taxpayers, was also needed to sustain a military and commercial capability that would be definitive of the modern state. Empire, colonies, military might, monarchical power itself – all these needed much more than what Quilligan calls “a feudal gift economy of service” in order to be viable (Quilligan 1983, 56). Already by the early sixteenth century, rulers like the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I were kept in thrall to bankers like the Fuggers.20