Slytherin, the Chamber and the Basilisk (Re: Choice over Heritage/Heirs)

[Iris FT]

No: HPFGUIDX 45977


 
  
 

Gulplum wrote:

 

 

 

 

 “(Actually, I'd like the 
story to pan out by making Slytherin out to be a Good Guy, despite having 
built the Chamber. OK, he hid a Basilisk in there, but Hagrid, who is 
presented to us as a Good Guy, also has an affinity with nasty creatures...).”

 

You put it in brackets, but I think you pointed something very interesting.

I don’t know if this has been debated yet: why did Slytherin build the Chamber of Secrets, on which purpose? Why did he hide the Basilisk?

In the second book, the Basilisk is presented as a weapon Riddle uses to get rid of the wizards who don’t fit with his blood prejudice theories.

Of course the author tells us Salazar Slytherin didn’t want muggle born wizards at Hogwarts, but would he have been able to attack or kill them, as Riddle did? There’s a big gap between an ideology and its practice.

Nobody can deny that Slytherin had intolerant ideas, but there’s no proof in canons that he put them into practice. Therefore, when Riddle/Voldemort claims for Slytherin inheritance when he commits a crime, he essentially puts into practice his own interpretation of Salazar’s ideas, takes and arranges them so they fit with his personal madness and hatred. He acts exactly like Hitler, who took in Nietszche’s philosophy ideas he interpreted with his outlook to develop his own theory about a so-called “superior race” and caution his “final solution”.

We don’t know if Slytherin would have been able to turn into a monster as Riddle did, though he was prejudiced towards muggle-born students, and rather mind-twisted. Ideas, how they grow up, how they travel through time and minds, how people put them into practice, forget them, twist them; this seems to be one of the HP series themes.

But this doesn’t explain why Slytherin put a Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets.

 

a)    We don’t have a canon proof he wanted to use it as a weapon to get rid of some of the Hogwarts’ students. Or did he tamed it, trained it in secret but didn’t have the time to put his plan into practice, whether he died, whether the others (Gryffindor and Co) stopped him? So that he would have rely on his heirs to finish the dirty work he had begun. That’s classical, leaving the forthcoming generation the care of revenge; that would also explain why only a heir of Slytherin is able to open the Chamber of Secrets.

 

 

b)    Did he want, on the contrary, to prevent it from attacking people? That would explain why the snake is locked into the Chamber. In that case, Slytherin would indeed come out as a good guy, who protected people from the monster. Like in old legends, the Basilisk had been killing people for a long time, terrorising everybody, when Slytherin came and tamed it thanks to his Parseltongue gift, and managed to put it where it wouldn’t kill any more.

 

 

c)    Another solution: Slytherin hid the Basilisk in the Chamber to protect it, just as Hagrid did with Aragog or Norbert. We know Slytherin had affinities with snakes, and that he had an elitist conception of wizardry. He couldn’t have another pet than a Basilisk, the King of Serpents. The problem was this pet was deadly dangerous; even if it was tamed, it could kill only by looking. It’s easy to guess the Hogwarts community was not very keen to have such a plague lurking around, and told Slytherin to get rid of it. Poor Basilisk, Slytherin had to hide it. I don’t think this solution fits with JKR’s project, but I enjoy the parallelism Gulplum made between Slytherin and Hagrid. Imagine old Slytherin saying “Where’s mummy?” to the new born Basilisk
 Or being one of Hagrid’s ancestors, and transmitting him his affinity with monsters
Read that paragraph and forget it!

 

Well, that’s all I had to say on this topic. I still don’t know why Slytherin built the Chamber of Secrets, and why he put a Basilisk inside. Any idea?

 
Iris  


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