The small poor boy with angel's wings on the back of a two-headed dragon — the most disarming apparition in the Goetia, who finds every hidden treasure and brings serpents to the hand that asks.
Valac appears as a small poor boy with angel's wings, riding upon a two-headed dragon. The description is one of the Goetia's most memorable and most paradoxical: the greatest possible contrast between the rider and the mount, between the form's vulnerability and its vehicle's power. A small poor boy — not a great man, not a warrior, not an elderly sage, but a child, and specifically a poor one — riding the most formidable mount in the entire catalogue. Only Astaroth (29th) also rides a dragon, and Bune's three-headed dragon is his throne rather than his vehicle. Valac's two-headed dragon carries a child.
The small poor boy is the Goetia's most deliberately unprepossessing human-form spirit. Where Furcas is a cruel old man with authority written in his age and cruelty, and Foras is a strong man with power in his physique, and Bune speaks with a comely voice, Valac presents as the figure least likely to command anything — a poor child, small, without the social standing that poverty denied him in the world the grimoire was written for. And yet this poor boy rides a two-headed dragon and commands thirty-eight legions of spirits. The Goetia's characteristic paradox of disarming form concealing enormous power is nowhere more complete than in Valac.
The angel's wings on the small boy's back complete the paradox by adding a celestial dimension to the earthly poverty. The boy who cannot afford decent clothing has the wings of an angel — the most exalted spiritual creature in the tradition, the being closest to the divine. Valac is simultaneously the lowest of human social categories (the poor child) and among the highest of spiritual categories (the winged angel) — a being who has compressed the complete vertical axis of the spiritual-social hierarchy into a single form that defies every expectation.
The two-headed dragon recalls Bune (26th), who sits on a three-headed dragon, and Astaroth (29th), who rides a dragon while carrying a viper. Dragons in the Goetia are the supreme vehicles of power — not mere large animals but creatures whose dual-headedness signals their capacity to face in two directions simultaneously, to govern two domains at once. Valac's two-headed dragon is the vehicle of double sight: the mount that can look in two directions, bearing the boy who finds hidden treasure by seeing where others see only earth.
Valac holds two powers of complementary scope: the discovery of hidden treasures and the bringing of serpents to the conjurer's hand. Both involve revealing or delivering what is normally inaccessible — the wealth buried in the earth and the dangerous creature that must be handled with knowledge and authority. Valac is the spirit of the thing-that-cannot-be-reached made reachable.
The two powers share a structural principle: both involve the taming of what is normally dangerous or inaccessible. Hidden treasure is dangerous to seek — it is guarded, concealed, sometimes protected by traps or other spirits. Serpents are dangerous to handle — venomous, unpredictable, the animal most universally associated with mortal danger. Valac makes both safe: the treasure becomes findable, the serpent becomes handleable. The small poor boy with angel's wings who rides a two-headed dragon has already demonstrated, in his own form, the principle that appearance of danger and reality of safety can coexist. He is himself the paradox his powers enact.
The poor child as a spiritual figure carries deep roots in religious traditions across the ancient world. In the Hebrew tradition, the youngest son (David, Joseph) and the child of poverty (the infant Moses) are figures of hidden divine favour — the person whose social insignificance conceals a spiritual election that will eventually be revealed. In the Christian tradition, the infant Christ in the manger is the supreme expression of divinity in the form of poverty and smallness — the Lord of Creation appearing as the most vulnerable and least socially significant form available.
Valac's poor boy form carries this tradition into the grimoire context: the being whose social presentation is one of absolute insignificance concealing absolute authority. The angel's wings on his back are the sign of divine election that his poverty conceals — the spiritual mark that contradicts every social signal his form presents. He is poor in appearance and celestially ranked in reality; he commands nothing in the social world and commands a two-headed dragon in the spiritual one.
The serpent-bringing power has specific resonances with the tradition of the holy child who tames dangerous animals. Infant Heracles strangled serpents in his cradle; the young St Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland; the child saints of hagiographic literature routinely tamed wild animals that adults could not approach. Valac's serpent-charming places him in this tradition of the holy child whose spiritual authority over nature's dangers is precisely proportional to their social vulnerability: the more helpless in worldly terms, the more powerful in natural terms.
The name Valac (also rendered as Volac, Valak, Valu or Ualac in various manuscripts) has attracted considerable attention — particularly the form Valak, which appeared as the name of a demonic entity in the 2018 horror film The Nun and its sequels, significantly raising the spirit's modern cultural profile. The original grimoire Valac is a child on a dragon; the film's Valak is a terrifying nun. The orthographic similarity masks a complete divergence of characterisation: the grimoire's poor boy and the film's demonic sister share only a name and a serpentine connection.
Valac is invoked for the discovery of buried or hidden wealth and for safe handling of serpents — and, more broadly, for the principle he embodies: that what appears most dangerous (the serpent, the two-headed dragon, the buried hoard) can be safely approached by the one who knows how to come to it without the armour of social authority. The small poor boy with angel's wings arrives without the markers of power and commands everything that the powerful cannot reach. The treasure buried from the great is findable by the child who knows where to look.