Nyx in the House of Night

pathway. In Zoey’s circle, she and her friends each hold a colored candle to represent the five elements: purple for Spirit, red for Fire, green for Earth, blue for Water, and yellow for Air. The Cherokee also have spiritual associations with certain colors, but in their case the colors are associated with the seven directions they hold as sacred: North (blue), South (white), East (red), West (black), Sun (yellow), Earth (brown), and Self (green).
    When Zoey starts smudging, she begins by wafting the herb smoke at the feet and works up the body, front and back. She does this for each of the four members of her circle, beginning with Damien, who is positioned on the east side of the circle, before handing the smudge stick to Stevie Rae, who smudges Zoey, as well. Then, Zoey speaks an adapted version of the Cherokee Purification Prayer that her grandmother taught her (modified to pay homage to the vampyres’ Goddess), again beginning while facing the east and moving through each of the other directions in turn. The smudging ritual is traditionally performed in all four directions, too: East, West, North, and South.
    Later in Marked , Aphrodite uses a smudge stick as well—except, as Zoey notes, she doesn’t smudge with sage first to purify and skips right to burning sweetgrass, which attracts spirits both good and bad. Because she doesn’t have a good understanding of herb usage, Aphrodite conducts a ritual that goes very wrong, and as evil spirits invade her ceremony, she has no idea how to stop what happens until Zoey steps in. But the practice of summoning the bad before cleansing it away is actually a traditional Cherokee practice: sweetgrass is used in combination with sage to summon bad spirits or negativity first before they are cleansed away by burning sage.
    There are a few other Native American symbols and rituals of note in the series, though they aren’t strictly Cherokee in origin. In Untamed , Sylvia rushes to help Zoey after Raven Mockers invade the House of Night campus and Kalona begins to infiltrate Zoey’s dreams and Aphrodite’s visions. Sylvia brings two items with her: protective pillar candles and dream catchers, described in Untamed as a “leather wrapped circle with lavender-colored string webbed inside, and caught within the center of the web was a smooth turquoise stone, the breathtaking blue of a summer sky. The feathers that hung in three tiers from the sides and the bottom were the pearl gray of a dove.” After Sylvia advises the girls to hang the dream catchers in their windows by their beds, she tells them that dream catchers do more than attract good dreams. She says they guard against bad ones and protect the owner’s sleeping soul from harm. Although protective pillar candles and dream catchers can’t be directly linked to specific Cherokee legends the way they are referenced in the series, their use does accentuate aspects of Native American beliefs. Pillar candles, for instance, have an herbal aroma that many believe creates an aura of protection, and the candles themselves empower spells and rituals by the energy derived from them. And while the creation of dream catchers is attributed to the Ojibwe People, many Native American tribes (not including the Cherokee) have references to them.
    In Native American culture, dreams hold great power and drift in the night, coming to those asleep. To keep the dreamer safe, tribal elders created dream catchers, a special web inside a circle with dangling ornamentation, usually beads and feathers, that hung near the places where people slept in lodges and teepees, or on baby cradleboards. Similar to what Sylvia tells the girls, when bad dreams traveled through the web, they lost their way and got entangled, only to be destroyed by the first rays of daybreak. Good dreams, though, know the way and always travel through the open center of the web, finding a path to the sleeper.
    The turquoise in the center of Sylvia’s dream catcher plays a role in Native American beliefs, as well. In many Native American cultures, turquoise is known as “sky stone” and is considered a sign of well-being, good health, and luck. Unlike in the House of Night series, however, where Sylvia also uses a handful of crushed turquoise to repel a Raven Mocker from Zoey’s window, it has no special ability to ward off evil—though in some Native American cultures, it is believed to have protective qualities. Throughout the series, we see Zoey take the real