Valac

Valac, who also appears as Volac, Valak or Valu, holds place 62 among the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, the first of the five books of the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, a seventeenth-century compilation attributed to Solomon on no grounds at all. The attribution is a device of authority, not a fact: the biblical king had been dead twenty-five centuries when the book was written.

His oldest mention is earlier and lies elsewhere: the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of Johann Weyer, published in 1577 as an appendix to his treatise De Praestigiis Daemonum. There one reads, in Latin, "Volac magnus Præses", Volac a great president. And there he bears a different number: **he is spirit 50, not 62**. Weyer's list has sixty-nine spirits; the Ars Goetia added four more, reordered the whole and arrived at seventy-two. The 62 is his Goetic number and nothing more, though it is repeated as if it had been his identity from the start.

It is also worth knowing who Weyer was, because it changes the sense of the whole catalogue. He was a physician, a pupil of Agrippa, and he published his list of demons inside a book written to **stop the witch hunts**: he held that the accused were sick or deluded women, not criminals, and that whoever really dealt with spirits was the learned magician, not the peasant being burned. Europe's most quoted infernal repertory therefore came from the pen of a man trying to prevent executions.

The text of the Ars Goetia is terse and must be quoted whole because every word counts: he appears "like a boy with angel's wings, riding on a two-headed dragon". Angel's wings, not dragon's. The confusion is common and worth pausing over, because it changes the image: the boy is not the monster's offspring, he is something of another order mounted upon it.

The grimoires do not explain the image, and that is precisely the source of its force. They describe and do not justify. The contrast between the childish figure and the mount suits his office, which is to find what is buried: the boy evokes the innocence that reaches hidden things, and the dragon, the treasure-guardian of the old myths, from Fafnir to the one that watched the fleece. But that is our reading, not the text's.

His seal, says the Goetia, "must be made and worn as a lamen", that is, as a plate hung on the officiant's breast. It is not a figure traced on the ground nor an object buried: it is an insignia worn, and that precision distinguishes the grimoire from the free versions in circulation.

There remains what almost everyone is looking for on arriving here. The Valak of the cinema, the demonic nun of The Conjuring 2 and The Nun, **has nothing to do with this spirit**. It is a creature written in 2016 for the screen: it changes the sex, the look, the period and the office, and keeps only the name. A winged boy on a dragon who says where the gold is and where the serpents are is not a nun in a black habit. Knowing this does not spoil the film: it places it.

His office is two things that are really one. He gives true answers about hidden treasures and tells where serpents may be seen, and the text adds a detail that usually drops out of summaries: **he brings them and delivers them to the officiant without force or violence**. There is no struggle, no cunning, no announced danger. He is a spirit who answers. He commands thirty legions, a modest number beside the great kings, fitting an office of prospecting and not of war.

That the two abilities are one is plain as soon as they are put together: the buried gold and the serpent coiled on top of it are the same scene, and it appears across half of Europe and the Near East before any grimoire existed. Valac says where the find is and what guards it.

Two things were ascribed to him here that are in no source. The first is the ritual: it was said the grimoires prescribe invoking him on planetary days and hours of Saturn or Mercury, with the seal in virgin wax inside a triangle and **offerings of animal blood to secure his obedience**. The Ars Goetia does none of this. Its calendar goes by **rank** (kings, marquises, dukes) and not spirit by spirit; the seal is worn as a lamen; and the only blood the book names, a black cock's, is for making the Secret Seal, not for buying anyone's submission. Ascribing ritual instructions to a text that gives none is a serious error, because the reader believes them.

The second is kundalini. It was said his serpents evoke that hermetic symbolism; they cannot. Kundalini is a notion of Indian tantrism that enters Western occultism at the end of the nineteenth century, first with theosophy and then with Woodroffe's The Serpent Power of 1919. A text of 1577 cannot allude to it: the distance is more than three hundred years and half the world.