The Sides of Slytherin

                                 By Kim Whaley

                  Introduction: What is a Slytherin?

     Before we begin to analyse the inner workings of Slytherin house, we first must know one very important thing; what exactly is a Slytherin?

     Slytherin house is one of the four houses of the British wizarding school, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of houses, houses are a grouping system that Hogwarts uses, determining a student's dorm room, which table he or she sits with at meals, and whom the student has classes with. The house system also is used as a basis for interhouse rivalries; each house has it's own team when it comes to the subject of Quidditch, and each house competes for the highest number of 'house points' at the end of each year, earned by getting good grades and lost by getting into fights or breaking any of Hogwart's pre-established rules. In the past, the house system also had a big influence on who befriends whom, but in more recent years, the pressure to befriend only your house mates has diminished to the point of being almost non-existent.

     There are four houses in Hogwarts, and each student is sorted into them with an enchanted hat, which is fittingly called the Sorting Hat. The Sorting Hat determines the type of character the student has, which then sorts them into the proper house based on that character; the brave go into Gryffindor house, the intellectual go into Ravenclaw house, the social go into Hufflepuff house, and the ambitious go into Slytherin house. Of course, a person is not just 'brave' or 'social', but usually a mix of the different house traits, so often the sorting also depends on student preference.

     Despite the Slytherin house's official traits being cunning and ambition, the house had also gained an additional, unofficial trait; evil. This is utterly preposterous, for an entire house can never be unfailingly evil, but I will not deny that Slytherin has had more dark wizards and Azkaban-bound than any other house. Some notable dark wizards of Slytherin include Tom Riddle (also known later as Lord Voldemort), Bellatrix Lestrange, and even Salazar Slytherin himself. In the following chapters, the topics of the traits of Slytherin and the dark wizards of Slytherin will be touched on again, but for now, this is all we need to know.

     The Slytherin common room is located in the dungeons of Hogwarts castle, and has a doorway that can only be accessed by tapping a certain pattern of bricks with a wand; that is, if you can find the wall you need to tap in the first place. The house colors are silver and green, the element of the house is water, and the house animal is the snake.