Why don’t women burn in Hell?
All across the Hells we see only wicked men condemned to endless tortures for their missteps in life. Sisyphus and Tantalus – those two homos – for a start – and their pal Ixion, the least famous of the menage a trois.
King Ixion, after a long period of resentment against his father-in-law, killed him. The father-in law-had stolen some of Ixion’s horses because Ixion had ducked paying the promised fee for marrying his daughter, Dia. Eventually Ixion went insane from the guilt of what he’d done – the murder, that is, of wife’s father. It wasn’t murder in and of itself that was so wrong. It was the soiling of the sacrosant social structure, the violation of the universally accepted norms. He’d spat upon courtly etiquette, you see. So what happened then…
…well, the story gets complicated, which is why we don’t hear about Ixion much these days.
Not just tried. He did fuck it. He fucked the cloud. And Zeus caught it on camera – Olympus was known to be the most surveilled palace in the Heavens at that time.
Caught in The Act, Ixion jumped out of bed, pointing his finger at the cloud, saying “She lead me on!”
Zeus shot him and – because he’s King Of The Wide Blue & Black Heavens and can do anything he wants – sentenced King Ixion to be strapped to the back of a flying saucer for all eternity.
This spinning wheel of fire – spinning, spitting sparks – would sail across the sky again and again and again and again…and Ixion, well, he would just have to put up with it, wouldn’t he?
In nine months, the Hera-shaped cloud gave birth to the race of Centaurs – half-man, half-horse. This makes one wonder: From whence did these equine genes originate? And why in Hades would Zeus keep a cloud shaped like his wife around for nine months?
In later times, as the Heavens became more crowded, Ixion’s blazing bed was pulled down and transported to the Underworld. Probably, Gloomy Pluto Lord Of The Dead bought it for a conversation piece – the ultimate wagon-wheel coffee table/novelty lamp combo.
Illuminating the caverns of the underworld with his torment, I bet Ixion missed sailing through the clouds.
In other news: Ixion’s wife Dia gave birth to a son fathered by Zeus. This royal son became a great horseman. With a steed between his legs and the open sky smiling down, he wandered the wide plains of Northern Greece alone and happy.