Invoking Valac in Magic: Powers, Correspondences & Dangers
Valac is one of the most distinctive spirits in the Ars Goetia — and one of the most misunderstood. He holds the rank of President, appears in a form that seems almost contradictory to his nature, and specializes in a domain that goes far deeper than the surface reading suggests. If you've been drawn to his name, that pull is worth following. This article is your grounded, practical introduction to who Valac is, what he actually does, and how to begin working with his energy in a way that's honest, informed, and intentional. Whether you're approaching Goetic work for the first time or adding Valac to an established practice, knowing the full picture before you begin is what separates effective invocation from guesswork.
Who Is Valac? Rank, Role, and Nature in the Goetic Tradition
Valac — also spelled Valak, Volac, Valu, Ualac, or Valax depending on the source — is listed as the 62nd of the 72 spirits in the Ars Goetia, the first section of the 17th-century grimoire known as The Lesser Key of Solomon. His rank is President, one of six noble titles used in the Goetic hierarchy to classify spirits by their nature and function. Presidents tend to be spirits oriented toward knowledge, revelation, and intellectual dominion rather than raw force. Valac fits that pattern precisely — his specialization is finding things that are deliberately hidden.
Valac commands 38 legions of spirits. In Goetic terms, a legion was understood to represent a vast host of subordinate entities, which signals that this President carries significant authority within the hierarchy. He is not a minor spirit. His ability to marshal that many forces speaks to depth of influence, and practitioners who work with him consistently report that his presence is unmistakable — focused, precise, and carrying an intelligence that feels both ancient and oddly youthful, which makes sense once you know his appearance.
The Ars Goetia describes Valac appearing as a small child with the wings of an angel, riding a two-headed dragon. That image is genuinely strange if you approach it literally, but symbolically it communicates everything. The child's form suggests innocence, access, and the ability to move unseen — to slip beneath ordinary awareness. The angelic wings point to a spirit that still carries the memory of a higher order, even within the Goetic framework. The two-headed dragon beneath him represents dual sight: the capacity to see in two directions at once, across the surface of things and beneath them simultaneously. Valac embodies that dual perception entirely.
His primary attributed powers are two: he can reveal where serpents are hidden, and he can reveal the locations of treasures concealed in the earth. Read narrowly, those are oddly specific abilities. Read symbolically — which is how skilled practitioners approach all Goetic powers — they open into something far more useful. Serpents in magical and mythological traditions consistently represent secret knowledge, primal forces, cycles of transformation, and hidden dangers. Buried treasure represents latent value, occluded potential, and resources that exist but cannot yet be accessed. Valac is, at his core, a spirit of revelation. He exposes what is deliberately concealed, whether that means literal objects, hidden truths, buried patterns in a situation, or the secret nature of other people.
Within the Goetic hierarchy, Valac is one of eight Goetic Presidents. He shares that rank with spirits like Marbas, Buer, Botis, Forneus, Foras, Glasya-Labolas, and Haures. Presidents as a class tend to be associated with arts, sciences, and the revelation of hidden knowledge — Valac is among the most focused and narrow in his domain, which actually makes him easier to approach with precision. He has no noted demonic affiliations or specific enmities recorded in the classical texts, and the grimoires do not describe him as resistant or deceptive when properly invoked. That said, his powers carry their own specific risks, which we'll cover in depth in the precautions section.
Valac's Correspondences for Modern Magical Practice
Correspondences are the symbolic language of magic. When you align your working with the right element, planet, color, metal, and timing, you're not following an arbitrary checklist — you're tuning every component of your ritual to resonate at the same frequency as the force you're calling on. Think of it as adjusting every instrument in an orchestra to the same key before you play. For Valac, those correspondences reflect his nature as a revealer of hidden things, a spirit of dual sight and concealed knowledge.
Here are Valac's core correspondences as understood in traditional and modern practice:
- Element: Earth — Valac's powers center on what is buried, concealed beneath the surface, and locked within the physical world. Earth governs hidden wealth, material secrets, and the deep strata of things not immediately visible.
- Direction: North — traditionally the direction of Earth in Western ceremonial magic, associated with concealment, depth, and the unseen foundations of material reality.
- Planet: Moon — the Moon governs hidden things, secret knowledge, and what lies beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Its association with cycles and revelation makes it the natural planetary ruler for a spirit who exposes what is obscured.
- Number: 62 (his position in the Goetic list) and 38 (his legion count) — 62 resonates with duality and revelation; 38 carries vibrations of expansion and deep spiritual authority.
- Colors: Dark green, black, and silver — green for the earth and its hidden wealth, black for concealment and the darkness in which things are buried, silver for the Moon's revealing light.
- Metals: Silver (lunar resonance and revelation) and lead (Saturnian depth, hidden foundations, and things buried in the earth).
- Incense and Herbs: Myrrh, wormwood, mugwort, and patchouli — myrrh for consecration and opening to hidden realms, wormwood and mugwort for psychic sight and the ability to perceive concealed truths, patchouli for grounding the working in the physical and earthen domain.
- Stones and Crystals: Obsidian (deep sight and hidden truth), labradorite (revelation of concealed patterns), black tourmaline (protective grounding during revelation workings), and moonstone (lunar alignment and psychic perception).
- Sigil: Valac's unique sigil from the Ars Goetia — used as the focal point of any invocation or petition working.
- Day: Monday — ruled by the Moon, making it the natural day for workings aligned with hidden knowledge and revelation.
- Time: Midnight or the hours of darkness — Valac's domain is what is hidden, and working at the threshold of the unseen hours deepens alignment with his energy. Lunar hours are ideal.
When you're building a working with Valac, you don't need every correspondence present. Choose the ones most accessible to you and most resonant with your specific intention. A black candle, his sigil, a piece of obsidian, and a clear statement of what you need revealed is a functional starting point. The correspondences amplify — your focused will is still the engine.
Dangers Specific to Working with Valac
Every Goetic spirit carries risk, but the risks are not identical across the hierarchy. Understanding the specific dangers associated with Valac — not just the generic warnings that apply to any spirit — is what lets you approach this work with real preparedness rather than vague caution. Valac's dangers are particular to his nature, and they're worth taking seriously.
The most significant risk with Valac is unwanted revelation. When you invoke a spirit whose core power is exposing what is hidden, you cannot always control the scope of what gets uncovered. Practitioners who call on Valac to reveal a hidden truth in a situation sometimes find that the revealing doesn't stop at the intended target — his influence can surface things about yourself, your situation, or people close to you that you weren't asking about and weren't ready to see. This is not malice on Valac's part. It is simply the nature of his power operating beyond the narrow channel you intended. Before you invoke him, be genuinely honest with yourself: are you prepared for what you might find out? Not just the thing you're asking about, but the things that may come with it?
The second specific danger involves his serpent domain. Valac's traditional power to reveal where serpents are hidden has a magical analog: he can expose the venomous, dangerous, or deceptive elements in any situation. If you invoke him to reveal whether someone is trustworthy, he may show you more than you asked for — and the revelation may involve you as well as them. Working with serpent energy in any tradition carries the understanding that the snake bites in both directions. Valac is not a spirit to call on when you only want confirmation of what you already believe. He will show you what is actually there.
There is also a documented characteristic worth noting: Valac's appearing form — a child with angel wings — can create a false sense of safety. Newer practitioners sometimes interpret a gentle or non-threatening appearance in a spirit as a sign that the working will be mild or easy to manage. Valac's child form does not indicate weakness or harmlessness. It indicates access and subtlety. Do not underestimate this President based on visual impression. Treat him with the same disciplined respect you would give any spirit of 38 legions and centuries of recorded working history.
Finally, be specific in your petition. Valac's power is precise by nature — he finds specific things. Vague requests produce vague and sprawling results when working with a revelation-oriented spirit. If you ask him to show you "the truth about your situation," you are opening a very wide door. Define what you actually need to know, state it clearly, and bind your working to that intention. The more focused your will, the more focused his response.
Historical Roots: Where Valac Comes From
The Ars Goetia as a text dates to the mid-17th century, but the tradition it draws from runs far deeper. The 72 spirits of the Goetia are understood to derive from earlier demonological and angelic catalogs, with roots in medieval Jewish mysticism, Arabic magical traditions, and the broader European grimoire tradition that began crystallizing in the 13th through 16th centuries. Valac specifically appears in earlier sources than the Lesser Key of Solomon, which helps confirm that his character was not invented wholesale for that text.
Valac appears in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, published in 1577 — one of the earliest comprehensive demonological catalogs in European print. Weyer lists him as "Volac" and describes the same essential attributes: a child's appearance, the dragon mount, and the power to reveal serpents and treasure. The consistency between Weyer's account and the later Ars Goetia suggests both were drawing on shared earlier sources, possibly manuscript grimoires circulating in occult circles before printing standardized these traditions.
The figure also appears in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft from 1584, where the spirit is named "Valu." Scot was writing as a skeptic attempting to debunk witchcraft beliefs, but in doing so he preserved a remarkable amount of folkloric and grimoire material that might otherwise have been lost. Valac's presence in Scot's text, even under a slightly different name, confirms his circulation in late 16th-century English magical thought.
The serpent-finding power is worth pausing on historically. In pre-modern European and Near Eastern contexts, serpents held a layered significance that modern readers often flatten into simple symbolism. Serpents were associated with the earth itself — with telluric currents, hidden water, mineral deposits, and the unseen forces running beneath the surface of the land. A spirit who could reveal hidden serpents was, in the worldview of his original practitioners, a spirit who could read the hidden structure of the earth and expose what moved within it. That is a genuinely powerful magical ability, and it maps cleanly onto the modern practitioner's need to perceive concealed dynamics, hidden influences, and buried truths in any situation.
Continue Exploring the Goetic Hierarchy
Every spirit in the Ars Goetia belongs to a rank — King, Duke, Marquis, Count, President, Prince, or Knight — and knowing where a spirit sits in that hierarchy is what turns a list of names into a real working knowledge of the tradition. If you're ready to see how Valac fits alongside the other 71 spirits and the Presidents he ranks among, read The 72 Demons of Solomon: A Complete Compendium by Rank. It organizes the full Goetic catalog by nobility and walks you through the powers and character of each spirit in turn.
Approach this work with respect, move at the pace your practice can hold, and trust that your understanding will deepen with every spirit you come to know.