Thank you all for such great conversation and help.

A few notes of my own:

First, I'm greatly appreciative of the breadth of interpretations of the
invisible hand that have developed (along with their representations). I'm
giving a "Great Ideas of Western History" talk and want to draw on the long
tradition and influence of the hand. While Smith must play a role in such a
dialogue, he neither initiates it nor can he be allowed to control it.
Economists and historians are right to attend to Smith's particular usage,
and we must not use the hand to mean prices or allocation and then attribute
that usage to Smith because that is just historically incorrect. But the
idea that simply because Smith didn't use the invisible hand to mean price
theory doesn't mean that such a usage is invalid. Smith does not have the
final say over the entire discipline. Rather such uses of the hand must be
judged valid or invalid based on their explanatory power or other criteria
deemed acceptable by the discipline -- that to me seems to be the problem.
While the hand may at one time have plugged into the worldframing concepts
of the wider populace and offered an explanation for economic phenomena that
people found efficacious and useful, the popular worldview has changed and
today such uses of the hand appear to most (at least in the economics world)
as a way to by-pass deep thinking. The term, however, remains efficacious
for some, and the question it seems to me is why the term continues to do
"work" for some and yet seems so useless to others. That deeper question
involves both a better understanding of the traditions of the hand (thank
you Warren Samuels) and of the multiple worldviews of economists and the
wider public.

Second, some have suggested the futility of seeking to visually represent
the "invisible hand." To those who think such a project is physically
impossible or at least not helpful, I must say that as complex rational
creatures humans frequently represent the invisible and the representations
greatly affect the way in which we think and act. For instance, think of the
concept of love. Love is not visible -- the effects of love or the results
of love are, but imagine a world with no visual representations of love. For
that matter, think of the forces of supply and demand. While individual
instances of supply and demand are visible, the aggregate forces we depict
on chalkboards (or powerpoint) year after year are invisible. Our visible
representations, however, have changed the way we see and act in our world.
Similarly, I believe the invisible hand has often been represented in
Western culture though attribution has not always been made.

I'm deeply thankful to all of you for help. The suggestions and images span
a huge spectrum of interpretation and influence.

Peace,
Joe Blosser