Clever Harry Potter Theory Will Change Everything You Thought You Knew About Chamber of Secrets
So, here’s the deal: Salazar Slytherin is still very much alive and hungry for Mud-Bloods by the time Harry Potter enters Hogwarts, and Harry himself kills the ancient wizard.
From what we know about the four Founders of Hogwarts, they were the mightiest wizards of their time — at least, on the British Isles.
That’s why at some point, they gathered together and decided it was time to create an institution for proper magic studies and make sure there are no little uncontrolled wizards running around.
The Founders then created a massive castle called Hogwarts and started organizing the schooling process. Soon, one of the first schools of wizardry in the world was fully operational, and the first kids started entering it to study magic.
This was cool with everyone but Salazar Slytherin, the man who was all for the purity of blood.
What do we know about Salazar Slytherin? The most cunning and ambitious of the four Founders, he was incredibly talented in magic and wanted this gift to be only passed on to the Pure-Blood magicians like himself.
As we learn in the second book and movie, Salazar created the Chamber of Secrets and made it home to the dreadful Basilisk — the King of Serpents. Only the true heir of Slytherin was capable of opening the Chamber and releasing the Basilisk to resume its hunt for Mud-Blood wizards in Hogwarts… Or that’s how the story goes.
What if both the legends and the Harry Potter books are missing one crucial detail? What if the Basilisk never belonged to Salazar Slytherin because it was Slytherin?
It would only make sense if the symbols of the Hogwarts Houses were represented the Animagus forms of the four Founders. This would imply that Slytherin was a snake of sorts; now, what if his Animagus form was not just any serpent but the Basilisk, the King of Serpents? This sounds rather fit for the man, doesn’t it?
For over a thousand years, Salazar Slytherin kept living in his beast form in order to survive as even the most powerful wizard can’t live that long; or, perhaps, he suffered the same fate as Nagini and just couldn’t return to his human form one day.
Slytherin never ran from Hogwarts — he stayed to perform the purges himself.
This would explain why of all snakes, only the Hogwarts’ Basilisk was capable of only allowing certain wizards to communicate with him and control him; this would explain why only the descendants of Slytherin himself could get in touch with the Basilisk — and why Harry couldn’t reason with him even by using Parseltongue.
Salazar Slytherin remained in the castle he built with his colleagues for longer than they have just to continue his reign of terror and awaken once in a while to purge the Mud-Bloods from his school, and no one had any idea — unless, of course, we consider the theory that Godric Gryffindor became the Squid, but that’s another story.
Over a thousand years have passed, and then the mightiest wizard, the Founder of Hogwarts, and the King of Serpents was slain by a twelve-year-old wielding his former friend and rival’s enchanted sword. Somewhere outside, the Giant Squid was laughing underwater.
What a stupid yet poetic death.