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All Men are Mortal, All Death Eaters are Slytherin: Logic, Observer Effects, and Snape's Spying

“There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin.” Hagrid, PS

We are explicitly told that all witches and wizards who go bad are Slytherin, and rather strongly invited to infer the converse, that all Slytherins are bad. Certainly Harry seems to have little problem believing the worst of his rival house.

But let’s look at what we know of the most extreme of those who “went bad”—those who became such ardent supporters of The Most Evil Dark Wizard of All Time™ that they took his Mark onto their own flesh and bound themselves to him permanently.

Harry (and the reader) assumes that Death Eaters were almost all Slytherins. Hagrid asserts, absolutely falsely, that they were Slytherins without a single exception. But does canon actually support the contention that they were even mostly Slytherins?



We must agree that many of them were. Riddle was in Slytherin, after all; his original supporters date from his Hogwarts days, and many of the younger ones are descendents or younger family members of previous Death Eaters. (Indeed, it’s hard to see how a Death Eater could avoid raising his child to be a supporter—whether he wanted to or not. What would either Lucius or Draco’s life expectancy have been, had Riddle returned to find Draco not primed to accept him as his Master?)

If we assume that the House situation was as bad under Dippet as it is under Dumbledore—that is, that House rivalry is so severe that cross-House friendships are strongly discouraged—and that many if not most children sort themselves by family affiliations (all Weasleys are Gryffindor, all Blacks are Slytherin), then (almost) all of Voldemort’s original supporters, and the majority of those recruited by their families, will be Slytherin. Plus Voldemort’s overt agenda pays lip service to Pureblood supremacism (though many Pureblood supremacists, like Sirius’s parents, did not support him), and Pureblood supremacists are somewhat more likely to sort Slytherin.

But do we have any canon evidence that those recruited through any other inducement are more likely to be Slytherin than not?

In fact, Snape’s becoming Dumbledore’s double agent might, of itself, have produced an optical illusion that Death Eaters were predominantly Slytherins.

If Snape was, as seems likely, the only double agent among the branded DE’s, then he was the primary means of identifying DE’s aside from capturing or killing them mid-raid. Yet Snape was a twenty-year-old Half-blood from an impoverished background. He was not welcome socially in Pureblood-supremacist circles, except insofar as the (Slytherin) ones tolerated their scions occasionally associating with a former housemate, and he was not likely to be rubbing shoulders with his elders in power at the Ministry. Which means, as I suggested in my fiction “Too Long a Sacrifice,” that those whom he could identify at full DE meetings through a mask and cloak would be his previous close associates: his contemporaries and housemates.

Some assumptions I made: one, that in the graveyard gathering Voldemort was careful to name only those who had already been “outed” as a DE—i.e. who’d been previously accused but got off on, say, the Imperius defense. That explains why the list of names Harry gave Fudge matches the old trial records. I’m further assuming that if Riddle didn’t name someone, their identity as a DE had not been compromised (that he knew of). Two, that Jodel was right, the reason all but one of Karkaroff’s names was useless is because he and Snape were in the same cell, and Snape had already turned them all in (except Severus apparently had been unable to identify Rookwood—an Unmentionable by profession, a generation or more his senior). Three, that if we definitely know a child or sibling was in Slytherin, we’ll accept that the parent/sibling probably was. What does that give us?

Using these assumptions, I put together a table (which I don’t know how to reproduce on lj) listing the 31 named DE’s as of VWI, house if known/suspected, probable DE relatives, if Severus was known/suspected/likely to have known them, and if they were accused of being DE’s as of the end of VWI.

Of the six people named (in HBP) as Riddle’s early associates/followers, Dolohov is probably a no-house foreigner (picked up while Riddle was associating with “the worst”—Dolohov is a specialist in torture), the other five (Lestrange, Avery, Mulciber, Rosier, and Nott) are probably Slytherins. Two of them are alive as of OotP; the other four we don’t know.

Of Severus’s “gang of Slytherins” named by Sirius, four of the five are closely related to other DE’s (Avery, Rodolphus Lestrange, Bellatrix Black Lestrange, and Evan Rosier; Wilkes is the possible exception).

Of the other known Slytherin DE’s we have: Rabastan Lestrange, Lucius Malfoy, Regulus Black, Sev’s “creepy” friend Mulciber, and the senior Crabbe & Goyle.

Of named non-Slytherin DE’s we have Karkaroff & Dolohov (no house) and Peter Pettigrew (Gryffindor).

Of the eleven other named DE’s, we have no house information (I’m sure Harry believes the Carrows to be Slytherin, and perhaps Jo wants us to, but this is nowhere stated). And there are at least twenty or so DE’s as of Voldie’s first fall (per Jodel’s count of the graveyard scene), possibly more, on whom we have no information, not even names.

But that gives us seventeen presumed Slytherins out of at least fifty branded DE’s. Which is about a third—higher than random chance, but nowhere near Hagrid’s “not a one but was in Slytherin.” Of the seventeen, five were original recruits, eight known relatives of other DE’s, and only Snape, Wilkes, Crabbe & Goyle were possibly recruited without benefit of family ties (and the Crabbes are intermarried with Blacks—so Crabbe, like Lucius, may have been recruited through his in-laws).

But now let’s look at named DE’s who were killed, captured, or accused (but incorrectly acquitted) before or at the end of VWI. There are 17 of them, including Snape. Eight were Slytherins whom we are explicitly told were associates of Severus Snape, three more may have been (Rabastan is the brother of a named associate, and Crabbe and Goyle, if they followed the marrying-young-in-wartime pattern, may have been Severus’s near-contemporaries), and three are not-known-to-be-Slytherins who were probably in the same “cell” as Severus (Karkaroff himself, Dolohov and Travers).

(And note that Dolohov, Rosier, Travers, Avery, and Mulciber were all caught after Karkaroff—and near or after Voldie’s downfall [Rosier was killed, and therefore Karkaroff & Dolohov apprehended, before Halloween, but Travers was free and killing the Mackinnons in July]—which would make sense if Dumbledore protected Severus’s identity by not unleashing the Aurors on all of Severus’s cellmates until after Voldie’s defeat.)

In fact, there are only two DE’s named that’d been exposed by the end of VWI with no known or apparent connection to Snape: house-unknown Macnair and (elderly) Slytherin Nott.

So of named DE’s exposed as of the end of VWI, fifteen of the seventeen may have been caught on the basis of Snape’s information. Of whom we have Severus, eleven people probably known to Severus because they were his housemates, and three turned in on the basis of cell affiliation, of whom two were no-house and the third of unknown house.

Of the thirty or so DE’s who apparently escaped the end of the first war without being suspected (the anonymous ones in the graveyard), NONE is actually subsequently revealed in canon to be Slytherin.

Jo may have wanted us to believe that All Death Eaters are Slytherins, but she actually wrote nothing except a demonstrated lie from a biased and inaccurate source to support that contention.

Sirius, in fact, may have gotten it exactly backwards; it may be, not that Snape was “part of a gang of Slytherins who nearly all turned out to be Death Eaters,” but that those who were part of Snape’s “gang” were nearly all turned IN as Death Eaters. In fact, for anything we know Severus may have managed to finger every Slytherin of his generation who joined.

In which case we’d have twelve Slytherin Death Eaters in Severus’s generation, at least eight of whom were recruited by their families—and about thirty others, so an average of ten a house (if all are British and of his generation).

Slytherin as the House of Evil, indeed.