Novena and Velación

Two Catholic devotional forms with one name apiece, constantly confused with each other. The novena is nine days of prayer for a petition, usually before a saint's feast; the velación is a vigil - a night or a series of nights of watching with candles - and in the Hispanic Caribbean it covers both the wake for the dead and the spirit gathering at which a medium sits with the muertos. The words are used loosely on both sides of the Atlantic, and the same nine-night structure can be a novena to a saint or a velación for a dead person.

A novena is prayed on nine consecutive days, at a set hour, before an image, with a candle and often with a written petition and a promise of what will be given if the prayer is heard; the ninth day closes it with thanks whether or not the answer came. A velación is a sitting: candles, water, coffee, tobacco, flowers, and the people who come to watch and to pray, whether the dead person is a body in the room or a spirit being invoked. In espiritismo the velación is the misa, and the medium develops the spirits present.

The novena is a real devotion of real Catholic communities, and its folk use - a candle, a promise, a nine-day argument with a saint - is not a lesser version of the liturgy. The tradition's own ethic is that a saint is asked, not commanded, and that a promise made must be paid; the corpus's saints.json makes the same point about treating saints as vending machines. The velación for the dead is a duty owed to a person, not a service to be bought, and paid 'velación' services sold to tourists in New Orleans and Havana are a commercial form the communities themselves do not treat as the rite.