A Letter To My Fellow Slytherins
I have agreed to publish the following letter on behalf of Mr Luthior Severn. I have not attempted to independently verify the claims made by Mr. Severn in his letter, and request that any responses to this be sent to him directly by owl.
To all my fellow Slytherins,
Like you, I am appalled at the new measures proposed by Minister for Magic Hermione Granger. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the intended purpose of many of these – the requirement for Wizengamot candidates to answer intrusive questions on all contact they may ever have had with pureblood supremacists, for example, or the ban on multiple members of the same family holding Ministry positions except by specific permission of the Minister – is to prevent Slytherins from ever holding influence within politics. The package as a whole is, quite simply, unconscionable.
However, there is one particular measure which Slytherins ought to support: the abolition of the Sorting Hat. The history of how Slytherin came to be seen as The Pureblood Supremacist house has been told many times, but will bear another retelling.
As is well-known, the founders of Hogwarts left only vague statements about what traits they most valued in their students. Helga Hufflepuff in particular is often claimed to have accepted any student at all; it would be more true to say that, like more than 99% of the inhabitants of Britain during the Dark Ages, she left no written opinions on any topic, including what to look for in an apprentice. Salazar Slytherin celebrated students of “honour and nobility”, but it remains unclear whether he meant nobility of bloodline or merely of character. For that matter, it remains unclear why the houses today should be bound by our deeply limited understanding of what four people thought a thousand years ago.
None of the founders made clear statements about the importance or lack thereof of magical ancestry – and why would they? The modern interest in “blood-purity” is a product of the persecution period. In the two-and-a-half centuries leading up to the 1689 International Statute of Secrecy, tens of thousands of witches and wizards across Europe were executed by muggles. It is hardly surprising that in that context, magical folk came to view themselves as different from – and superior to – their non-magical neighbours. That view has proved long-lasting around much of the world up to the present day, and even in the most enlightened societies it remained unquestioned dogma well into the 19th century.
The first great wizard to challenge this was, of course, Publius Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury had unquestionable pedigree: his grandfather Julius had been twice Minister for Magic, and his father likely would have followed suit were it not for Publius’ pro-muggle activism, including several breaches of the Statute of Secrecy. All three of these men, I am proud to note, were Slytherins.
Publius was controversial in his time, but over time most people came to be persuaded by his arguments. By the 1930s, muggleborns were increasingly welcome not only at Hogwarts but also in the Wizengamot. Formal restrictions on Ministry employment of muggleborns had been lifted, although the Old Boy’s club still blackballed muggleborn wizards (and, of course, witches, regardless of their ancestry) from senior Ministry jobs. It was during this period that Slytherin house first came to be seen as the pureblood house – partly due to an unusually high concentration of scions of noble families which seems to have occurred largely by chance, and partly due to the now-debunked pseudo-scholarship of Orion Black.
The defeat of Grindelwald in 1945 was seen as finally putting paid to the discredited notion of pureblood supremacy. It was in this atmosphere that Albus Dumbledore took the hat which had long held pride of place in the Gryffindor common room, enchanted it to speak, and declared that henceforth this would be the means of sorting students into houses. Never mind that or hundreds of years previously, students had routinely moved between houses, and usually had friendship groups which cut across houses. Never mind that Dumbledore himself was never quite clear on how exactly he had enchanted the hat, and that it had manifest errors and idiosyncrasies (such as its refusal to sort any Weasley, a family line traditionally associated with Hufflepuff, into a house other than Gryffindor). Never mind that the hat itself was of deeply spurious provenance, with no written record mentioning it prior to the early 1700s, and that pointed hats are now thought to have entered fashion more than a century after the deaths of the Founders. Dumbledore’s well-meaning but fundamentally misguided iconoclasm viewed all links to the past as something to be done away with, and he had the power to make the changes he wanted.
What little remained of the old pureblood privileges were done away with after the brief Voldemort regime of the 1990s. Relative to the magical population as a whole, muggleborns are in fact now overrepresented among senior post-holders in the Ministry for Magic.
We have furthermore seen numerous libels against Slytherins in the period since. No trace of the so-called “Chamber of Secrets” was found during the excavation of Hogwarts following its destruction in battle1; the many Slytherins who fought against Voldemort’s forces in that final battle, including eight who gave their lives, have been written out of the history books. Slytherins continue to be conflated with pureblood supremacists, despite the fact that muggleborns are now almost as prevalent in Slytherin (17% of current students) as in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw (25% and 19% respectively).
The anti-hatred laws which were originally intended only to outlaw the m-word slur have been increasingly weaponised to ban any discussion critical of Minister Granger’s regime. Her latest measures are yet another move in this culture war, aiming to end hard-working and honourable people’s professional careers on the basis of the house they were selected to aged eleven. This is an appalling attack on the rights of Slytherin citizens, and all of us must do what is necessary to prevent the measures from passing. But there is one small sliver which is in fact very much in our interests. Let us consign the sorting hat, once more, to obscurity.
Yours,
Luthior Severn
Senior Under-Secretary, Department of Magical Transportation and Infrastructure
Slytherin 2009-2016
I am surely not alone in finding Mr Potter’s claims that this supposed chamber can only be opened by a speaker of Parseltongue, and that he conveniently lost this ability following the death of Voldemort, deeply far-fetched.