Here it is, canon evidence that Salazar Slytherin was NOT a racist bigot. He was concerned for the well-being and safety of the magical community, which could have been compromised by letting the “common people” know that wizards and witches existed.
Shoutout to this fine lady for bringing this to my attention. Let’s further the argument:
Hogwarts was canonically founded around 990 A.D. – The Christians were finally taking hold of Scandinavia, meaning that all of Europe was now Christian. It was towards the end of the Dark Ages, or else the Early Medieval Period, which (In Europe) was famous for its intolerance of non-Christiandom, which included the teachings of Ancient Rome, Greece, and of course any Eastern countries. People were publicly defamed and in many cases killed for as much as considering these old ideas and teachings. These teachings really didn’t come back to light until the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century.
So when people did things the Christians couldn’t explain, they blamed it on Witches; people they believed to be inhabited by the devil, sent to earth to wreak havoc on every God-fearing man, woman, and child. So what did they do? Imprison or kill those people.
Now, here comes Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin, who all agree to take pureblooded witches and wizards and teach them. But then they have to discuss magical folk who aren’t born from magic folk.
Gryffindor is brave and brash, and imagines the glory of having an entire society of witches and wizards with great command of their powers.
Hufflepuff is kind and loving, and wants to provide a sanctuary for all those who are under duress from the population at large.
Ravenclaw sees the merit in bringing all these different people together – the amount of information regarding magic that can be shared is the stuff of her dreams.
Slytherin is cautious. He recognizes that there is a great possibility for individuals to play spy for the Muggle community, in hopes to gain favor by outing them all the while hiding their own powers from muggles. He sees them as a potential threat, and instead of risking the safety of not only their own lives,but the countless volumes and tomes of ancient wizarding knowledge tucked away in their castle (see The Burning of the Great Library at Alexandria), Slytherin says “I really don’t think we should allow people with connections to Muggles in here. We could lost *everything.*
Gryffindor calls Slytherin a coward, saying they would fight back and beat down any who try to oppose them. Slytherin suggests they do all they can to avoid confrontation. Hufflepuff can’t bring herself to deny that sanctuary she’s built. Ravenclaw sees endless potential in bridging that gap between worlds with learning. And this is what drives them apart. Future racists and pureblooded elitists will take and twist Slytherin’s words, having heard only the story that has been passed down for a thousand years. They use words of caution to justify their want for genocide.
Slytherin isn’t the bad guy, here. And I am so down for clearing his name.
To continue the crusade to clear the name of Salazar Slytherin, I have more evidence for your consideration. This is regarding the Chamber of Secrets.
Now, the scene pictured above is one of Harry’s slightly less dull History of Magic classes, in which Professor Binns is asked to talk about the Chamber of Secrets. What we get from him is that the Chamber is a myth. There is legend surrounding it, no one is sure if it exists, etc etc etc.
Here is the VERY NEXT PAGE in the book, in which Professor Binns again admits to the Chamber (as we know it today) to be a complete myth. We find out, obviously, that the chamber isn’t a myth, but I believe that the purpose of the chamber has been fabricated over a thousand years by misinformation and slander.
Let’s check it out. Rowena Ravenclaw, Helga Hufflepuff, and Godric Gryffindor all know Salazar Slytherin and say “yep, he’s an upstanding man. Let’s start this school with him!” For a number of years, they had a school together and it worked out great. What we know is that there was a falling out, not Slytherin declaring they needed to murder muggle-borns! A disagreement that may have ruined friendships but did little else, I think.
What we know is that one of Slytherin house’s key virtues is self-preservation. As I discussed earlier in the thread on this post is that Slytherin was afraid of muggle-born witches and wizards acting as spies for the larger muggle community during a time in which wizards and witches were killed for their “demon powers.”
And so, when it comes to the Chamber of Secrets, I believe Slytherin built a Panic Room, not an Evil Lair.
Think about it. Slytherin is horrified that any day there might be an attack on the school. So he builds a secret chamber that only he (or another parseltongue, an incredibly rare magical ability) can open. He doesn’t want any double agents or spies to know about it, so he tells no one. He hopes, of course, that he never has to use it, but in the event that there is an attack, he can get the school to safety while he sets the basilisk on the attackers.
But I’m sure you’re looking at the basilisk and thinking “what sane man would put a monster in a panic room?” Glad you asked. I can consider two possibilities.
1) Slytherin put a basilisk that was under his control in the chamber, a creature that he could set loose on his enemies, aka, anyone attacking the castle. The basilisk would annihilate any army of thousands just by looking at them, and what’s more, it could get almost anywhere in the castle through the goddamn walls! That kind of power is exactly what you need to defend your castle. And again, ONLY HE or an heir could control it. I’m sure at this point he was thinking about himself and his potential progeny, not Tom Riddle some thousand years later.
2) Slytherin didn’t put the basilisk there, and it was instead placed there later by Tom Riddle while he was at school. I don’t have evidence supporting or disproving this.
So how does this get so misconstrued to modern-day Hogwarts lore? Maybe toward the end, the founders did find out about the Chamber. Maybe Slytherin said something to them, maybe he let it slip…maybe as they were cleaning out his room after he left, they found some journal entries about it. It could have been anything. But perhaps, in their wisdom, seeing no way to access the chamber, felt it best that no one knew about the existence of a (now) useless panic room, nor did they want anyone to worry about the basilisk.
Maybe word *did* get out, though. And not one of the founders wanted to admit that Slytherin didn’t trust their students, and so to most of the student body, Slytherin’s departure was suspect. And the moment they heard about a secret room that no one was quite sure about, they started inventing campfire stories about it.
Fast forward ONE THOUSAND YEARS and now everyone assumes Slytherin was always evil (despite being a good friend and founder of Hogwarts with three other lovely people) and created a secret evil lair to murder muggle-borns, which he could have easily done without a lair if that was *ever* his intention.
Okay. We’re going to do this now because I will probably not
rest at ease until I’ve corrected the unholy mess that is this post. It’s long, I get angry, I’m sorry. So here
goes:
1) A bigot is a bigot is a bigot.
If a person is using the language of “threat”
and “risk” to deny children – ELEVEN YEAR OLDS – an education because
of the apparent risk they pose to adults in the community, then yes, they are a
bigot. It’s no different from white parents being antsy because there’s one
muslim kid in their child’s class. It’s the same principle.
2) The witch
hunts did not start in earnest till the 15th century.
Please; even Wikipedia has extensively sourced material on how the witch
hunts really only started in the fifteenth century, in the Early Modern period
in Europe. The general entry on Witch-hunts (and I mean come on, all this shite is right here on Wikipedia for
you to read for yourselves, rather than relying on some ludicrously false idea of
what the medieval period was like) on Wikipedia has this under its medieval
period section:
Early secular laws against witchcraft include those
promulgated by King Athelstan (924–939 AD):
“And we have ordained respecting witch-crafts, and
lybacs [read lyblac “sorcery”], and morthdaeds [“murder, mortal
sin”]: if any one should be thereby killed, and he could not deny it, that
he be liable in his life. But if he will deny it, and at threefold ordeal shall
be guilty; that he be 120 days in prison: and after that let kindred take him
out, and give to the king 120 shillings, and pay the wer to his kindred, and
enter into borh for him, that he evermore desist from the like.”
“We have decided, regarding witchcrafts, sorcery, and
murder, if anyone should thus be killed and it cannot be denied, they must pay
with their life. However, if they deny it, and at a threehold ordeal (three
innocence-tests e.g. drowning, fire, blessed-cake) be proven guilty they must
pay for it with 120 days in prison, and
their family must, after this time, pay to the king/government/tax collector 120
shillings, and the individual must pay wereguild (blood-reparation) to the kin
of the deceased and enter into a pledge with them that he evermore desists from
doing so again” (shoutout to essayofthoughts for converting the language)
Which in sum follows a pretty common cultural rule
concerning magic in all cultures, throughout the ages – you hurt someone
and it is “proved” that this hurt is the result of witchcraft, then you pay for
it. I think it’s a fairly reasonable kind of statement to make, given that it’s
not all that different from our laws against murder. I’m not sure why “magic”,
especially in the context of HPverse where magic does exist, is supposed to somehow preserve people from bearing the
weight of any crimes exerted against non-magic neighbours… And given the way
wix treat muggles in the books – obliviating them at will (hello yes, Goblet of
Fire World Cup anyone?) down to torturing them for sport (also, Goblet of Fire
World Cup when the Death Eaters make an appearance) and someone once proposing
to make muggle-hunting legal – it’s not an unreasonable sort of fear to have
imo.
(Keep in mind here, witches and wizards do have power that muggles don’t have access to and this, even though wix are a “minority” community does place wix higher on the power scale
than muggles. Muggles can retaliate only with weapons against a force which
they know nothing about. Think about
it. You’re living in a community with a bunch of people who have a kind of
power you don’t know the extent of, besides that they can kill without even
touching you, and you have to trust them to be good to you, even if they think
you’re dirt and inferior to them. So yeah, this is a case where I’d argue that
a minority community actually has more power than the majority community especially in the context of the medieval period. Unless you want to argue that all minority communities ever are persecuted,
in which case CONGRATULATIONS! Rich people who control the vast majority of the
world’s resources are now a persecuted minority!)
If you want more scholarly resources on the witch hunts,
there’s Kors & Peter’s Witchcraft in Europe, 400 – 1700: A Documentary
History, J B Russell’s Witchcraft in the
Middle Ages and Dissent &Order in the Middle Ages: The Search For
Legitimate Authority, this paper on the Medieval Origins of the Witch Hunts
from Cambridge Quarterly, this
sociology paper on the European witch hunt craze of the 14th -17th century from
the American Journal of Sociology and
this paper from The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History on the Historiography of the European Witchcraft.
This isn’t even like, 1/100th of the sources out there on the origins of the
witch-hunts/a survey of the scholarship on the matter. The consensus of all of them is that the witch hunts didn’t begin
in earnest till the 15th century, though there might have been persecutions
here and there. In fact till the 14th century, belief in the very idea of
witchcraft and that witches had the powers to do what some people claimed they
did was banned. To believe in the possibility of someone practicing witchcraft
was as much of a heresy as to practice witchcraft. It wasn’t until the 14th
century that the Inquisitions were authorized to prosecute for witchcraft and
even then it seems to have only been investigated incidentally during
investigations for heterodoxy.
TL;DR: You were more likely to get hauled up for heretical
beliefs and getting your theology wrong than you were for practicing witchcraft
in the medieval period.
3) The destruction of
texts on magic =/= persecution on the basis of witchcraft.
The post mentions that a lot of the texts dealing with
native magic practices were destroyed during the spread of Christianity through
Europe and while that’s certainly true of Norse magic (I know, because trying
to find non-apocryphal information on historical practices of Seidr is impossibly hard) I don’t think it
necessarily holds true across all of Europe, or hell, Britain. There’s a fair
bit of Irish and Welsh lore which survived, as well as Roman records on the
magical practice of druids (how much of it is true, we don’t know, but given that the
druids themselves passed their lore down mostly verbally this kind of is a moot
point imo) and a decent chunk of folklore magic survived and passed down quite
intact…
There’s a few points worth making here:
A lot of texts were being destroyed and counter-destroyed
as parts of various agendas during the medieval and early modern period. But I
don’t think that it necessarily means that all secular texts were destroyed and abandoned during this period. Iirc, Latin
was introduced into the nobleman’s curriculum via both the Bible as well as the Justinian Laws and the
Latin classics – similarly so with Greek – circa the reign of Charlemagne (~748 – 814 AD), during the Carolingian Renaissance. Here is a paper from the journal of The History Of Ideason the concept of the Carolingian Renaissance. This overflowed into the development of curricula at the European universities in the early medieval period. Sure, not everyone could go to
University to be educated, but these texts were definitely being studied at the
Universities of the times and given that the Arthurania (and its various
variations) became popular again in the 14th century or so, along
with the rise of the codes of chivalry, and that the Canterbury Tales are definitely
a thing which existed; it’s safe to say that the medieval period wasn’t just a bunch of people who suffered from
some kind of religious mania and never read/wrote anything else ever. That’s how they’ve been construed in our popular
imagination but it’s not necessarily an accurate image.
Given that in the course of my own research on
necromancy during the medieval period (because I needed information for fic
purposes, of course) I found several medieval codexes scanned on to online archives on how to summon demons
and other necromantic practices, I think it’s safe to say that not even writing
on magic was entirely stamped out or completely destroyed irl, let alone in HPverse.
A lot of folklore on magic & mythology was
incorporated into the church “lore” and survived albeit in syncretic form. I
think that’s true of most things tbh, I don’t think you can for a minute
pretend that any kind of belief/culture/cultural practice which exists today
exists in precisely the same form as it has always existed since the founding
of cultures. Cultures and societies are fluid and ever-changing, beliefs are
assimilated and discarded. In this case, a fair bit of folklore made its way
into shaping how the “commoners” practiced the formally introduced religion.
Honestly all you have to do is watch a few episodes of Horrible Histories to
figure this out on your own.
4) JKR on Salazar Slytherin
and Pureblood Mania:
Now that we’ve debunked the history parts of this post, let’s
move on to what JKR herself has written at various point in her books and Pottermore,
about the matter of witch hunts and pureblood mania.
In the Pottermore article on Purebloods and to some extent,
the article on the Malfoys, we’re explicitly told that prejudice against
muggleborns and muggles rose drastically after the institution of the Statute
of Secrecy (pretty much expected given that places most likely to vote in
favour of fascist & anti-immigration parties are also the places least in
contact with people from other races, ethnicities & cultures) and the idea that
muggleborns posed a threat because of the Statute only really came into its own
there. I think I’ll let JKR’s own writing
do the talking here.
Historically, the Malfoys drew a sharp distinction between
poor Muggles and those with wealth and authority. Until the imposition of the
Statute of Secrecy in 1692, the Malfoy family was active within high-born
Muggle circles, and it is said that their fervent opposition to the imposition
of the Statute was due, in part, to the fact that they would have to withdraw
from this enjoyable sphere of social life. Though hotly denied by subsequent
generations, there is ample evidence to suggest that the first Lucius Malfoy
was an unsuccessful aspirant to the hand of Elizabeth I, and some wizarding
historians allege that the Queen’s subsequent opposition to marriage was due to
a jinx placed upon her by the thwarted Malfoy.
With that healthy degree of self-preservation that has
characterised most of their actions over the centuries, once the Statute of
Secrecy had passed into law the Malfoys ceased fraternising with Muggles,
however well-born, and accepted that further opposition and protests could only
distance them from the new heart of power: the newly created Ministry of Magic.
They performed an abrupt volte-face, and became as vocally supportive of the
Statute as any of those who had championed it from the beginning, hastening to
deny that they had ever been on speaking (or marrying) terms with Muggles.
Magical opinion underwent something of a shift after the
International Statute of Secrecy became effective in 1692, when the magical
community went into voluntary hiding following persecution by Muggles. This was
a traumatic time for witches and wizards, and marriages with Muggles dropped to
their lowest level ever known, mainly because of fears that intermarriage would
lead inevitably to discovery, and, consequently, to a serious infraction of
wizarding law.
Under such conditions of uncertainty, fear and resentment,
the pure-blood doctrine began to gain followers. As a general rule, those who
adopted it were also those who had most strenuously opposed the International
Statute of Secrecy, advocating instead outright war on the Muggles. Increasing
numbers of wizards now preached that marriage with a Muggle did not merely risk
a possible breach of the new Statute, but that it was shameful, unnatural and
would lead to ‘contamination’ of magical blood.
As Muggle/wizard marriage had been common for centuries,
those now self-describing as pure-bloods were unlikely to have any higher
proportion of wizarding ancestors than those who did not. To call oneself a
pure-blood was more accurately a declaration of political or social intent (‘I
will not marry a Muggle and I consider Muggle/wizard marriage reprehensible’)
than a statement of biological fact.
JKR furthermore completely debunks the idea that muggleborns
were viewed with anything approaching suspicion during the 10th
century with this statement from the entry on Purebloods on Pottermore:
Slytherin’s discrimination on the basis of parentage was
considered an unusual and misguided view by the majority of wizards at the
time. Contemporary literature suggests that Muggle-borns were not only
accepted, but often considered to be particularly gifted. They went by the
affectionate name of ‘Magbobs’ (there has been much debate about the origin of
the term, but it seems most likely to be that in such a case, magic ‘bobbed up’
out of nowhere).
So let’s be very clear here. Slytherin’s views were
considered outliers at the time which certainly suggests that muggles were not
thought of as posing anything approaching a significant threat to the magical
community at all – which I think my write-up on the history of the witch-hunts + JKR’s own writing on the witch hunts amply explains. Muggleborns were considered unusually gifted because of their
ability to perform magic instead, so it’s more likely that Hufflepuff,
Ravenclaw and Gryffindor represented the mainstream views of their time and
weren’t necessarily fighting for some kind of airy ideology of
bravery/acceptance/collecting knowledge that they’d attached themselves to.
Speaking of which JKR is pretty damn clear that the founders
quarrelled over Slytherin’s views on muggleborns. Like, it’s not subtext or
in-text propaganda. JKR’s outright written it as part of HPverse history.
Where Slytherin’s views gain traction is after the institution of the Statute of
Secrecy following what I think was a particularly bad spate of persecution at
the hands of James II – under whom the witch hunt craze reached its zenith.
William of Orange took over in 1688, but I’m guessing that by then the damage
had been done to the wizarding community and presumably also, William would have
had other struggles in consolidating his power before he could get to dealing
with the witch hunt business. It’s under this condition of fear and resentment followed by separation from the muggles that
the ideology of pureblood supremacy really comes into its own and muggles go
from being just odd and harmless weirdoes into the image of a villainous and dangerous Other. This is in 1692. That’s nearly 700 years after the founding of Hogwarts. That’s when
muggles really started to be viewed as a threat to the wizarding world. Not
during the early medieval period. Not even under the rule of Queen Elizabeth
the First. In 1692 during the reign of William of Orange.
In the essay Harry mentions Wendelin the Weird, who actually
enjoyed being burnt at the stake so much, she allowed herself to be captured in
disguise forty-seven times and
escaped each time using flame-freezing
charms. The Fat Friar was executed because church members grew suspicious of
his ability to cure the plague by poking people with a stick and because he pulled rabbits out of a wine cup so it’s
not exactly like the dude was exercising caution over here or even trying to be
circumspect. Nearly Headless Nick enjoyed what seemed to have been a
pleasant life until he somehow cocked up fixing Lady Grieve’s (lady-in-waiting
to Henry VII) teeth and made her grow a tusk (like holy shitballs how bad do you have to be at magic to do that)
instead, after which he was imprisoned and executed the next morning in an
obvious parody of Tudor justice.
(The Tudors were a whimsical bunch to live under.)
There’s a few lessons/inferences we can make here:
The probability that actual wix were affected by
the witch-hunts is probably much less than we imagine they are or indeed, the
magical community imagines they are. Wix had a whole variety of charms to keep
their neighbours from ever really getting on to them – muggle repelling charms,
which we know is a thing given that Hogwarts was concealed by them all the way
back in the 10th century (besides being Unplottable and therefore, not-findable by wizards as well, so please don’t trot out their muggle repelling charms as
incontrovertible proof that they were afraid of muggle persecution; in all
likelihood they wanted to keep the castle out of any conflicts and to keep the
children in an environment where they could safely practice their magic without
accidentally hurting some random wanderers), anti-flame freezing charms to save
them from being burnt, Obliviates to make sure your neighbour never remembers
what happened to them and so on and so forth. You would probably have to have
been really daft (Sir Nick) or really obvious and careless (the Fat Friar) or
some kind of weirdo (Wendelin) to get caught for actually doing magic on
muggles. I mean ffs, the magical world can cover up a huge war during the
seventies in Britain where muggles are being killed in addition to magical folk
and you want to talk about how they were terrified of exposing the Statute?
Hon, that’s your answer right there.
The community probably most at risk for being
persecuted for magic is DING DING DING YOU GUESSED IT: MUGGLEBORNS. Guess why?
Because the kids actually live with muggles and are less able to control their
magic in their childhood and are actually at risk of exposing their magic (and
probably putting their families in danger from society) to people at large. notyourexrotic expresses this much better over here in this post. Hogwarts
would have been protection for these people, but no, what we’re doing here is
what literally every anti-immigration politician fuck has done in the past few
years and talked about how muggleborns would pose a “threat” to the stability
of magical society because of the risk they posed in exposing their society to
the muggle world. Yeah, maybe if you gave
them the support they needed they wouldn’t be at risk of doing so.
Leading off from this, it’s also likely that a
high proportion of muggles were impacted by this as well, especially if they
had muggleborn kids.
Where I imagine the witch hunts really would
have an impact on pureblood wix/wix communities proper is when whole villages were
being investigated for witchcraft which honestly was something which only
really started happening in the 16th-17th century
(especially under James II).
Also spies, really? An eleven year old is going
to want to be a spy on people who do magic because??? ????? ????????? I can
think of scenarios where a seventeen year old might agree to do something like
that but the only scenario where I can imagine such a thing happening is
when the seventeen year old has been isolated and injured and hurt by magical
society enough that they think it’s worth betraying them to find some kind of
home for themselves among a society which has promised to reward it, in this
case, muggle society. Like. In which case, the people clearly at fault here would be MAGICAL
SOCIETY. For injuring a muggleborn on the principle that they were a
muggleborn.
Salazar Slytherin has nothing to stand on concerning his prejudice. Nothing to legitimate it at all.
6) Cuthbert Binns.
Now that we’ve covered the historical accuracy of witch
hunts, who they would have been most
likely to have affected and how this fear of muggles is directly connected to
the institution of the Statute of Secrecy, I think it’s safe to say that we can
make this inference about wizarding history: it’s not objective.
I mean, history in general is not objective. What you have is multiple perspectives about a
series of events. In this instance, we get Cuthbert Binns’ version of history
which as we’ve seen over here, has little to no basis in history – either in
real life, or in the context of HPverse. We know that the curriculum at
Hogwarts is overseen by the Board of Governors, who consist of men like Lucius
Malfoy, as well as the Ministry of Magic – which happens to be in the pockets of
men like Lucius Malfoy. We also know that Cuthbert Binns has been around for a
long long time, so it’s safe to say that he hasn’t really acquired any new
perspectives on history or on muggles or muggle-wizard history/relationships
for a long long time.
In which case, it all begs the question: just how accurate
is Binns’ narrative of witch burnings? Is he simply reproducing a version of
history which has been produced and reproduced over and over again since the
institution of the Statute of Secrecy, to justify the actions of wix and moreover, to justify their hatred of muggles?
Is he a reliable narrator here, or is JKR employing an unreliable narrator to
tell us how wizards think of their history – supplying ample information on the
side to show us just how imbued with propaganda and pureblood ideology this
version of history is?
I think that this is very
much what JKR is doing here and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. If
Cuthbert Binns is a reliable mouthpiece, then so too is Severus Snape, Barty
Crouch as Mad Eye, Dolores Umbridge, Gilderoy Lockhart, Quirinius Quirrell –
any teacher, for that matter, at Hogwarts. But I think the books spent enough time
showing us just why this is not so for
us to not fall into the same trap here!
7) The Chamber of
Secrets.
A few things. JKR has told
us explicitly that Salazar put a basilisk in there. JKR has also told us
explicitly on Pottermore and in the books as well, that Slytherin and the
others quarrelled over the matter of letting in students of different blood
purity. We’ve also seen JKR’s own writing on the prevalent views on Muggleborns
at the time, so it’s clear that Slytherin was a statistical outlier.
Look at the structure of the Chamber of Secrets and tell me
what about it suggests that it is a “panic” room. Here are quotes from Chapter 17, Slytherin’s Heir, from The Chamber of Secrets:
And then, at last, as he crept around yet another bend, he
saw a solid wall ahead on which two entwined serpents were carved, their eyes
set with great, glinting emeralds.
He was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit
chamber. Towering stone pillars entwined with more carved serpents rose to
support a ceiling lost in darkness, casting long,black shadows through the odd,
greenish gloom that filled the place.
He pulled out his wand and moved forward between the
serpentine columns. Every careful footstep echoed loudly off the shadowy walls.
He kept his eyes narrowed, ready to clamp them shut at the smallest sign of
movement. The hollow eye sockets of the stone snakes seemed to be following
him. More than once, with a jolt of the stomach, he thought he saw one stir.
Then, as he drew level with the last pair of pillars, a
statue high as the Chamber itself loomed into view, standing against the back
wall.
Harry had to crane his neck to look up into the giant face
above: It was ancient and monkeyish, with a long, thin beard that fell almost to
the bottom of the wizard’s sweeping stone robes, where two enormous gray feet
stood on the smooth Chamber floor.
… watched Riddle stop between the high pillars and look up
into the stone face of Slytherin, high above him in the half-darkness. Riddle
opened his mouth wide and hissed — but Harry understood what he was saying…
. “Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four.”
Harry wheeled around to look up at the statue, Fawkes
swaying on his shoulder. Slytherin’s gigantic stone face was moving. Horrorstruck, Harry saw his mouth opening,
wider and wider, to make a huge black hole. And something was stirring inside
the statue’s mouth. Something was slithering up from its depths.
Something huge hit the stone floor of the Chamber. Harry
felt it shudder — he knew what was happening, he could sense it, could almost
see the giant serpent uncoiling itself from Slytherin’s mouth.
Everything about the structure, from the snakes twined
around the pillars and the doors with emeralds,
mind you, in the snakes eyes, to the giant statute of Salazar Slytherin,
suggests less place to retreat to in time of emergency and more “shrine to
Salzar Slytherin”.
The Chamber of Secrets itself is such an interesting room
because like. If ever there was a room as steeped in pure ideology, it’s the
chamber? The whole structure revolves around Salazar Slytherin; it’s a
self-glorificatory room and tbh that’s always what I’ve wondered a little about
Slytherin and its obsession with blood purity – if it was not a kind of
narcissistic self-worship that became reified into this idea that blood really
was the source of magical power and virtue in the wizarding world. The
flip side to murdering people for their supposed inferiority is the
glorification of the self – which is something you see a lot in fascist art and
propaganda; all based around either a single glorious figure, or an idealized
figure that people are meant to aspire to. I think that’s very much something
that’s going on in the Chamber of Secrets and the entrance being situated in
the girl’s toilet is something which amused me no end because again, JKR
strikes with a visual pun, but also again we get the “submerged in ideology”
image, because descending down this path gives you people willing to murder children for
being ‘inferior’ and having the wrong kind of blood and posing a ‘threat’ to the
superiority of pureblood society.
… the Chamber of Secrets is pure fascist ideology embodied,
it is not a panic room. Everything about its architecture is
reminiscent of the kind of architecture you’d get in a totalitarian fascist
state and it has a fucking living declaration of war and genocide (the
basilisk) living inside it, put over there by the man who created the room.
I think the description of the room speaks for itself and
the fact that JKR has independently confirmed that Slytherin did put the basilisk in there, it’s safe
to assume that Slytherin also set the code that would make his statue release
the basilisk from within its depths – which imo, I think is pretty telling
about the kind of person Salazar Slytherin was. I don’t think he really cared
about the wizarding world at all, I think he care more for his idea of it and for him, it was important
to preserve that idea and that ideal which he had conceived of – a typical
tenet of fascist ideology – and to do so, he actually hid a goddamn weapon of war inside a school full of children
with the intent that some day one of his heirs would continue his genocide on
his behalf.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY LAST POINT
8) All of this
reminds me disturbingly of the kind of rhetoric used to defend fascists,
racists and people who have committed genocide and large scale ethnic
cleansings.
Sure, Salazar could have killed muggleborns in any number of
different ways if he wanted to. But the thing about ethnic cleansings and
genocides is that the violence is rarely clinical or efficient. There is a huge symbolic element to violence. Arjun Appadurai more or less expresses this
idea in his paper Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of
Globalization. The gist of his analysis, based on the ethnic cleansing of
Tutsis during the Rwandan Genocide of 1995, states that the violence enacted on
the bodies of those being killed was never just about killing them, but was performed in such a way as to symbolize their “different-ness”
from Hutu bodies – even though it is nearly impossible to distinguish between
who is and who isn’t. The form of violence enacted on their bodies serves as a
marker and a distinguisher. I think it’s a point worth bringing into the
discussion here because it’s exactly what
Bellatrix does when she carves the word mudblood into Hermione’s arm. There is
no difference, magically, between her and Hermione – carving that word there
makes all the difference.
I just want this quote here to illustrate why this kind of violence
is never satisfying and why it continues and moreover, why it continues to justify itself as “rational” and “acceptable”:
“Of course the violent epistemology of bodily violence, the
`theatre of the body’ on which this violence is performed, is never truly
cathartic, satisfying, or terminal. It only leads to a deepening of social
wounds, an epidemic of shame, a collusion of silence, and a violent need for
forgetting. All these [acts] add fresh underground fuel for new episodes of
violence. This is also partly a matter of the pre-emptive quality of such
violence: let me kill you before you kill me. Uncertainty about identification
and violence can lead to actions, reactions, complicities, and anticipations
that multiply the pre-existing uncertainty about labels. Together, these forms
of uncertainty call for the worst kind of certainty: dead certainty.”
Everything about the Chamber of Secrets and the basilisk
being placed there to kill muggleborns is symbolic. Salazar is the one who
cares about protecting blood purity, it is his face that the wizarding world must look to when the time comes to rid
themselves of “the threat within”. He chooses a serpent to symbolize himself –
and tbh, if I wanted to there’s probably a whole level of Freudian analysis we
can make here, but lbr, the Chamber of Secrets is pretty much a kind of
hypermasculine fantasy without even getting into talking about how Salazar
chooses a snake; a symbol not only of
cunning, but of fertility, luck and protection – and to enact violence upon
muggleborns & muggles. It’s almost too obvious in its symbolism, but here we are with a very clear message being sent out:
that muggles and muggleborns do not deserve protection, they are not the kind of population that is to be
protected and they will be murdered by this symbol of all of these things
because they are less than human and the “evil within”.
Speaking of which, so much of the rhetoric in this post
focuses around muggleborns as the “evil within” or the “threat within”. I’m
genuinely curious here, does no one see the parallels between this kind of
language and the language used to justify the persecution of immigrants,
minorities and for fuck’s sake, used to justify the Holocaust? I think tumblr
user brotheralyosha puts it best here in this reblog of a post I made:
The idea that “foreigners” in a community are really spies
for outside powers who might destroy the community from the inside, and that
therefore need to be kept separate and defended against, is a fundamental
ideological component of fascism and white supremacy.
Here’s a poster, by the way, from the films which more or
less centre around the whole crux of this post – muggleborns posing a threat to
wizarding society from inside. It’s Death Eater propaganda, for the record:
The reason I’ve sat down to write a 5k word rant about this
post, with links to sources and stuff, is because I am genuinely disturbed that these are things we can say and endorse
unironically in fandom because they form
the crux of real world ideologies that have been used to murder people on the
basis of race, religion, ethnicity and sexuality. This is exactly the kind of defence that has
been used to bolster their arguments.
You know what I find invariably when people mention a “threat”
to their societies?
It’s the powerful majority speaking about a
minority they have been made aware of, which pose a threat to the social norms
and structures they have imposed on themselves to govern their lives.
There is almost never any actual threat, beyond a hysterically exaggerated one –
remember what I said earlier about the places most willing to vote in right
wing fascists being the ones with the least diverse populations, repeat that
again over and over again to yourself – which focuses on the idea of a “pure”
society which must be preserved. Societies are not pure, cultures are not pure;
they have always been syncretic, they have always been changing, they have
always been fluid and dynamic and anyone who tells you otherwise is
lying.
I’m sorry but J K Rowling did not write seven books of what amounts to a war against
this kind of ideological defence – Salzar Slytherin actually had the right
idea, he was the only founder who cared about the wizarding world but history
pilloried him as “paranoid” and “evil” because he chose to take “precautions”
against the “danger within” (honestly, do you think there aren’t actual
Nazis and Neo-Nazis and Anti-Semitists and racists and fascists who are spouting
this shit in defence of Hitler right now? Let me tell you, there
probably are!) – to have fandom spout it back in defence of a character
in the name of redeeming Slytherin house from its tarnished and “false” image
in the books. She deconstructed the whole mythos of muggleborns being a threat,
both historically and in the present day to show just how wrong Salazar Slytherin, Voldemort and the Death Eaters were in their beliefs. Congratulations!
You have missed a crucial point of the Harry Potter books in favour of
redeeming a character because you want to give kids who are sorted into
Slytherin “representation”.
Redeem Slytherin house as much
as you want. But don’t you dare use the defensive language of racists,
fascists and neo-nazis in your posts in an effort to “redeem” a character in a
bid for whatever twisted-ass idea of “representation” you’ve conjured up for
kids who are scared of being sorted into Slytherin on Pottermore. There is a
line and that line has been fucking crossed here and I am furious, but even
more I am frightened because this is the
sort of language that has been employed to tell me, an Indian immigrant living
abroad, that I am a threat to all that is good and noble about UK society and here we are, with fandom using it unironically in
defence of a character that JKR left no
ambiguity whatsoever over concerning their bigotry.
Please please be critical of the ways in which you choose to headcanon and defend characters who are clearly portrayed as bigots in the text!
It’s shit like this which makes me want to leave fandom.
Cheloneuniverse 