P10 - Pluto

His name means the wealthy one.

Not the god of death. Not the god of darkness. The wealthy one. Plouton: from ploutos, wealth. Because everything that comes from under the earth is his: gold, silver, iron, coal, uranium, and plutonium. Every mine shaft goes into his territory. Every resource that powers civilization was extracted from his domain. The connection to death came later, as a logical extension: the dead also go underground. But the original Pluto was primarily the richest entity that existed, because he owned everything beneath the surface that no one could see.

The ancient Greeks were so afraid of him they barely said his name. Not because he was evil (he wasn't, particularly) but because naming him drew his attention. He was called Plouton, the wealthy one; Eubouleus, good counselor; or Clymenus, the renowned. Anything but his actual name. He was the original He Who Must Not Be Named. There were no temples dedicated to him in Greece. No festivals. No cult statues in public places. When sacrifices were made to him (black animals, at night, conducted by priests in black robes) the offering was buried rather than burned. Everything went down. Nothing came back up.

He got the underworld by lottery.

After defeating the Titans, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots for the three realms. Zeus got the sky. Poseidon got the sea. Hades got everything else: the underworld, the dead, and the dark. He did not choose it; he drew it. He then went underground and essentially never came back. He is almost entirely absent from Greek mythology compared to the other major gods. He makes almost no appearances on Olympus. He has almost no myths that aren't specifically about his kingdom. He rules a third of the cosmos and operates in near total invisibility.

He abducted Persephone because he wanted her and he took her. No negotiation, no courtship. He came up through a crack in the earth, grabbed her while she was picking flowers in a meadow in Sicily, and dragged her underground. Demeter - goddess of agriculture, Persephone's mother - searched for her daughter for nine days without eating or sleeping, and in her grief caused the crops to fail and winter to settle on the earth. Zeus eventually forced Hades to return Persephone, but Hades had already fed her six pomegranate seeds - food of the dead - which bound her to the underworld for six months every year. This is winter. Every year, when Persephone descends to return to her husband, Demeter mourns and the earth goes cold. The seasons are the ongoing consequence of an abduction that was never fully undone.

His helmet made him invisible.

The Cyclopes gave it to him during the war against the Titans: the same war in which Zeus received his thunderbolts and Poseidon his trident. The helmet of invisibility. The god of the underworld, the unseen realm, wearing the helmet of invisibility. He cannot be seen, his kingdom cannot be seen, and the wealth he controls comes from under the earth where no one can see it. He is power operating entirely below the surface.

In Norse mythology she is Hel.

Daughter of Loki (the trickster god) and Angrboda, a giantess. Her siblings are Fenrir the wolf and Jörmungandr the world serpent. Odin, afraid of what these three children of chaos might become, cast each of them into a different realm. Jörmungandr into the ocean. Fenrir into chains. Hel into Niflheim (the world of mist, cold, and darkness) and gave her authority over the nine worlds of the dead. Not the heroic dead. Those went to Valhalla: to Odin's hall, to drink and fight until Ragnarök. Hel received everyone else: those who died of sickness, old age, accident, or murder. The majority. The ordinary dead.

Her hall is called Éljúðnir - Damp with Sleet. Her dish is named Hunger. Her knife is named Famine. Her bed is Sick-bed. Her threshold is Stumbling-block. Her servants are both named Lazy Walker. Her appearance: half living and half dead. One side of her face is flesh-colored, warm, and alive. The other side is blue-black and corpse-cold. She does not hide this. She is the condition itself: not death approaching, but death already present, standing in the same body as life.

She is not evil. She is just. When Baldr (beloved son of Odin and the most beautiful of all gods) was killed through Loki's scheming and descended to her realm, Odin sent a messenger to plead for his return. Hel agreed to release him on one condition: every being in the nine worlds, living and dead, must weep for Baldr. The gods sent messengers everywhere. Everything wept: every stone, every tree, and every animal. Everything except one: a giantess, Þökk, widely believed to be Loki in disguise, who refused. Baldr stayed. Hel's terms were met perfectly; and still the outcome held. She did not relent. The rule was the rule.

At Ragnarök she will sail the dead from her shores in a ship made of fingernails and toenails: Naglfar, the nail-ship, toward the final battle. Every uncut nail of every corpse contributed to it. The Norse encouraged keeping the nails of the dead trimmed for this reason.

The planet was discovered on February 18, 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh (a 24-year-old farm boy from Kansas who had built his own telescopes from spare parts and mailed his drawings to the Lowell Observatory until they gave him a job). The name was suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old girl in Oxford, who mentioned it at breakfast and whose grandfather passed it on to the Astronomer Royal. The observatory board chose it over Minerva and Cronus. Venetia received five pounds.

The year was 1930. The Great Depression had begun. Fascism was rising across Europe. Al Capone was at the peak of his power. Stalin's collectivization was killing millions of Ukrainians by engineered famine. The atom was being split in laboratories for the first time.

The element named after it was the one that destroyed Nagasaki.

Plutonium - element 94, symbol Pu - was synthesized in December 1940 at Berkeley by Glenn Seaborg and his team. Following the precedent that uranium was named for Uranus and neptunium for Neptune, element 94 was named for the next body in the sequence: Pluto. The symbol should have been Pl by convention. Seaborg chose Pu instead: "pee-yew," the sound a child makes when something stinks. He thought it would be rejected. The committee passed it without comment.

The paper documenting the discovery was prepared and submitted to Physical Review in March 1941. It was immediately withdrawn by the government and classified. The discovery of plutonium was kept secret for five years because one of its isotopes, Pu-239, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. The Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 had a plutonium core. Full detonation of one kilogram of plutonium produces an explosion equivalent to more than 10,000 tonnes of chemical explosive. Oppenheimer, watching the Trinity test, quoted the Bhagavad Gita: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Plutonium accumulates in bone. It has a half-life of 24,110 years. Trace amounts of it now exist in the body of every human being born after 1945, from atmospheric nuclear testing. It is named after the god of the underworld and it lives inside us.

Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, on the grounds that it had not cleared its orbital neighborhood of other debris. The decision was controversial - many astronomers still dispute it. It remains, in the public imagination, a planet. The demotion is itself Plutonian: a thing that was considered one thing, reclassified as something smaller, operating at the edge of the known system, out past Neptune in the dark, not quite what anyone thought it was.

What Pluto actually governs:

What is hidden. What operates below the surface of the visible. The power structures no one is supposed to see. The wealth that comes from underground. Transformation through destruction: not gradual change, but the kind that requires everything to be dismantled before anything new can exist. The thing you don't know is running your life. The compulsion you can't name. The inheritance from the dead that you're still carrying. The atom: containing more energy than anything visible about it suggests, and requiring controlled destruction to release it.

Pluto is not dramatic on the surface. He is quiet, invisible, operating underground. But everything he touches gets taken apart completely before it comes back together.