Today, in the concluding chapter of Histoire de la magie, I encountered a passing reference to Ixion and how he attempted to rape Hera but was tricked by Zeus into assaulting a fake Hera made from a cloud. Having only the vaguest recollection of this particular myth, I looked it up to get the details. The Hera-shaped cloud apparently became in some way a real woman who went on to bear children to both Ixion and Athamas, and this cloud-woman's name was Nephele (from nephos, "cloud").
I found this in Food for Centaurs:
The Wassons reproduce in their book the illustration I discovered for them in the late Professor A. B. Cook's Zeus: an Etruscan mirror-back dating from 500 B.C., which shows the Greek hero Ixion tied to a wheel. No one had previously noticed the mushroom growing at Ixion's feet . . . . In punishment for Ixion's attempt to rape the Goddess Hera, her husband the Almighty God Zeus soon sent him spinning through space, spread-eagled to a fiery wheel. Yet meanwhile Ixion had, in his delirium, mistaken a cloud for Hera, and begotten on it a son named Centaurus; which same Centaurus (an aberrant, rather than a delinquent) is said to have later fathered the Hippo-Centaurs -- half men and half stallions -- be debauching a herd of Magnesian mares.
Note that illustration of Ixion and the mushroom (understood by both Graves and McKenna to be a psychedelic species) is from a mirror-back -- and my previous post dealt with Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god whose name means Smoking Mirror, and the obsidian Aztec mirror used by John Dee. In my posts about Tezcatlipoca, I have always discussed him together with his brother Quetzalcoatl -- typically glossed as "Feathered Serpent," but also "quetzal-serpent," the quetzal being a type of bird.
This is from the very next paragraph in Food for Centaurs:
Ixion is wearing a pair of wings, and the mirror's circular border is decorated with a length of ivy. The wings plainly refer to the famous erotic charm mentioned by Theocritus, which made a member of the opposite sex fall madly in love with whoever tied a live wryneck to a fire-wheel -- the fire-wheel being an instrument for kindling fire by friction -- and sent it whizzing giddily around. . . . The wryneck (a peculiar bird, which hisses like a serpent) was sacred to the erotic God Dionysus, and gave him the surname 'Iynges' ('of the wryneck').
The wryneck is identified as "a peculiar bird, which hisses like a serpent." I looked it up on Wikipedia to see if it was at all closely related to the quetzal; it isn't, but the article notes the following:
These birds get their English name from their ability to turn their heads almost 180°. When disturbed at the nest, they use this snake-like head twisting and hissing as a threat display. It has occasionally been called "snake-bird" for that reason. . . . Its sound is described as a repetition of the sounds que, que, que, many times in succession, rapid at first, but gradually slowing and in a continually falling key.
"Snake-bird" is pretty close to being a calque of Quetzalcoatl -- and its call apparently resembles the first syllable of that god's name. This also ties in with recent owl syncs; the ability to turn its head an improbable number of degrees is a classic owl trait, and que is a Spanish word cognate with English who. Several posts here have linked the Latin qui, "who," with the call of the owl.
