Mercury

Some bloggers think Mercury is the worst planet, but he's definitely one of the coolest gods. He's the god of communication, but also of exchange and profit--two jobs that might look unrelated until you consider that a free market is basically a big price computer, and that the "invisible hand" of the market described by Adam Smith is actually an invisible brain (I guess this isn't so counterintuitive in the age of the Internet). English words like market, merchant, commerce (and thus the m in "dot com"), mercenary and mercy are all cognate with Mercury.

In Greek mythology, Hermes (Mercury's Greek incarnation) stole Apollo's cattle, and only agreed to give them back on the condition that Apollo would exchange his caduceus (the winged staff entwined with snakes that you see on hospitals, ambulances, etc.) for Hermes' lyre (the symbol of poetry). So even though Apollo is the god of poetry and poets (*ahem*), he actually has Hermes/Mercury to thank for it.

It's human nature to hate our creditors.

RATING: 100%

(Image from www.antinopolis.org. Read Frederick Turner's book Shakespeare's 21st Century Economics for a deeper discussion of markets, myth, meaning and morality.)