The Houses (was Sorting hat)

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 156192

Ivogun:

> Rowling really hasn't been fair to this type.

houyhnhnm:

I'm partial to the notion of the four Hogwarts Houses as the four 
elements myself, which is just a little hard to fit into the 
Procrustean bed of the MBTI. But fire, air, earth, water, Jung's 
typology, or Myers-Briggs--the idea is the same.  Unity in diversity.  
By meditating on the four, we come to appreciate both the multiplicity 
and the unity of creation. 

Rowling has *not* been fair to the fourth principle. I just have to 
believe it's intentional. Slytherin is the House that is not integrated 
into the rest of the WW because the unity of the four founders was 
ruptured by Salazar Slytherin (though I will not be surprised if in 
book 7 we find out there was more to it than that).  Slytherin is the 
House that has been corrrupted by Voldemort.  Maybe that's why we 
haven't seen its good side.  Perhaps the debilitation of the Slytherin 
principle is the reason there is "no place for the numinous" in the WW, 
the reason that, in spite of all the magical paintings on the walls at 
Hogwarts, the fine arts seem to play so little part in the lives of 
witches and wizards. These would all be part of the expression of the 
Slytherin temperament if the Wizarding World were healthy and whole.