I said “Yes, my father would read to me from the gospels before I slept, and my mother made a gift to me of a King James Bible when I left their home to seek my fortune in New York City.”
“Then you are acquainted,” he said, “with the verse…Out from the paragraphs of nonsense and dubious astronomy, a narrative emerges; the star that came to Earth was no bigger than would fit in the palm of your hand. It was found by a seafaring merchant in Lagash who later sold it to a Babylon…
Mammon
theological · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Mammon appears here as a figure from speculative or mythological narrative rather than a historical person—a Babylonian general in a fantastical genealogy of a magical object passed between merchants and military figures. The excerpts suggest the course is using Mammon (or conflating him with biblical Mammon, the personification of wealth and greed) to explore how narratives of desire, accumulation, and power circulate through technology and material culture, though his role remains fragmentary in these particular passages. This invocation likely enables discussion of how AI systems inherit and perpetuate ancient mythologies of possession and control embedded in their training data and design logics.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.