About Slytherin House

[babelfisherperson]

No: HPFGUIDX 33440

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "lucky_kari" <lucky_kari at y...> wrote:
> BTW, how do we know if the current prejudice against mudbloods is
> all the way back or recent, or has occured in spurts. At one end,
> we have Salazar Slytherin who reportedly objected against Hogwarts
> taking students from non-magical backgrounds (is there anything in
> the text to show whether his objections were based on any theory of
> blood, or were they more security-like? i.e. They stick to their
> world. We stick to ours, and the world goes a whole lot better,
> Godric.) On the other end, we have a bunch of Slytherins who insult
> others for not being pure-blood. Nearer to the latter than the 
> former we have Tom Riddle, who was definitely "mudblood", and was a
> great success in Slytherin.

I tend to think it was, at least initially, a security issue to 
Salazar. That was over a thousand years ago, in the midst of what we 
muggles know as the Dark Ages. Think about how muggles reacted to 
anything they percieved as "magic" in those days. It makes the 
Dursleys' treatment of Harry seem downright enlightened by 
comparison. So it's not difficult to see why Salazar would want to 
make sure no muggles whatsoever knew about Hogwarts. Also, if Salazar 
really were an evil-hearted bigot from the start, why wouldn't 
Godric, Rowena, and Helga have just founded the school without him? 
But apparently he eventually got to the point that he wanted to leave 
a monster behind that would kill all the "mudbloods". Or did he? We 
only have legends of unknown accuracy to show that it was really 
Salazar Slytherin who built the Chamber of Secrets & put the basilisk 
in it.

While I certainly don't like Slytherin as it's seen now, I do try to 
resist the knee-jerk assumption that simply because Voldemort is pure 
evil, that his distant ancestor must have been too. Likewise, it's 
not fair to assume that Salazar was a bigot because the students in 
his house, a millenium after his death, are bigots. For all we know, 
his concerns about muggle-born students could've had more to do with 
having to tell their muggle parents about the wizarding world, at a 
time when anybody believed to be connected to magic was likely to be 
burned at the stake, than with not wanting wizards & witches 
of "impure blood" in his school.

Red XIV