[From the 1937 (3rd) edition of Hogwarts: A History (F&B). The following excerpt was replaced by a shorter description of the Chamber of Secrets in all subsequent editions. Original copies of Bagshot’s tome have been removed from circulation; the only extant copy, outside private libraries, is held as a highly restricted read-in copy at the Hogwarts School library. The PensieveLeaks team accessed this excerpt from the 3rd edition through the personal collection of a source who requests to remain private.]
[. . .] Perhaps the strangest of the Hogwarts traditions is the opening of the so-called Chamber of Secrets. This event – one that is, unsurprisingly, shrouded in secrecy – has occurred every 50 years since the school’s founding and is the cause of school-wide stir ranging from rampant terror to perverse amusement. The tradition orients itself around a student, almost always a member of Slytherin House, who, through rites unknown, is appointed ‘the Heir of Slytherin’ for the duration of the academic year. Whether or not the ‘Heir’ is truly a descendent of Slytherin is beside the point: his role from Hallowe’en through the start of examinations is to periodically unleash a force known as ‘Slytherin’s Monster’ upon the school. Accompanied by the ‘Monster’ – the nature of which is the source of considerable debate – the Heir runs about the school with the intent of frightening members of the other three houses, either through the production of grizzly scenes or, in the most extreme cases, inflicting temporary magical paralysis.
Continued to the current day, the tradition seems to stem from the earliest years of Hogwarts. The story (supposedly told with considerable pomp among Slytherins at the start of each 50th school year) states that Salazar Slytherin, before leaving Hogwarts, created an underground chamber,its location kept secret and its entrance accessible only by Slytherin’s true Heir. This Chamber of Secrets contained a force that embodied the true spirit of Slytherin, and as such was to be used to do his most essential bidding: to rid the school of ‘impure blood’. Slytherin students were told the nature of the force but were instructed to hold it secret. The Opening of the Chamber traditionally occurred on Hallowe’en, and the Slytherin holiday celebration of yore are the stuff of Hogwarts legend: ancient rites, illicit bacchanalia, and finally, at midnight, the Appointing of the Heir. Once Appointed, the Heir would be guided by the Keeper of the Secret (at least in some cases, almost certainly the head of Slytherin House) to the entrance of the Chamber. What ritual must be performed there, none but the Heir can know. From that point onward, the Monster is released, and Slytherin’s reign of terror brings on disruption, annoyance, and jubiliation for the rest of the year.
Our oldest account of the Opening of the Chamber goes back to one Percival Otterly of Hufflepuff, circa 1592: ‘o ghastlee, what I have seen! my brouther, laine out upon the floore as tho slaine, bodie rigid as pewtere or perhaps granite tis the more opt word’. Such melodramatic accounts appear in records of the years 1642, 1692, and 1742. Two woodcuts, one of what appears to be a flayed unicorn spread across the entrance to the Great Hall and another depicting a most unflattering portrait of a Hufflepuff boy throwing back his four-poster curtain to find a pile of niffler heads, accompanies the Slytherin House annul of 1693. The attacks appear to have gotten particularly out of hand in 1792, when a the matron reports the internment of some 23 students (including the entirety of the Gryffindor House Quiditch team) in the newly updated Hospital Wing for ‘ailments brought opon by All Hallow’s foolery’; records of that year include an order for 25 pounds of supplementary mandrake root ordered from southern France, presumably for the brewing of an antidote. The ritual seems to have died down in recent centuries. In my own day at Hogwarts I recall rumours spread amongst the younger siblings of graduated students who had witnessed the supposed horrors of the 1892 opening; I had it from Professor Ronen, the Charms teacher at the time, that the only victim of that year had been a muggle-born Hufflepuff’s toad. Tragic though it may be for that and other toads, the Chamber of Secrets appears to be a mean-spirited but ultimately harmless diversion whose primary purpose is to spook the spookable and to carry on the joyous inter-house rivalry that defines the divers Hogwarts experience.
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