Rank: President · Legions: 38 · Element: Water · Direction: East · Enn: Avage secore on ca Volac
Volac, written also Valak, Valu, and Ualac, is the sixty-second spirit of the Ars Goetia, a President mighty and great, who governs thirty-eight legions of spirits. He appears in a form unlike almost any other in the book: a child with the wings of an angel, riding upon a two-headed dragon. His office is to give true answers of hidden treasures, and to tell where serpents may be seen — and, the grimoire adds, to deliver those serpents into the hands of the one who calls him void of any force or strength in themselves, harmless. The whole of Volac is held in the strangeness and the gentleness of his image. He is not a fierce king or a monstrous composite but an innocent winged child, and yet he rides the two-headed dragon and commands the serpents; and his gift with those serpents is not to slay them but to take the venom and the force out of them, to render the dangerous harmless. Volac is the winged child who tames the serpent — the spirit of gentle mastery over what is fearsome, who disarms the danger rather than fighting it, and who masters the dragon he rides not by force but by a fearless and innocent authority. He is one of the most quietly remarkable spirits of the Goetia, and, as it happens, one of the most misunderstood, for his name has been borrowed by the modern screen for something he is not at all.
He is Volac in many books, and Valak, Valu, or Ualac in others. He appears in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1577, passed into the Ars Goetia as it was gathered into the Lemegeton in the seventeenth century, and was set into modern English by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley in their 1904 edition. The texts agree closely on his account: the winged child upon the two-headed dragon, the true answers of hidden treasures, the finding of serpents and their delivery harmless — the President of thirty-eight legions.
There is no avoiding it, for it is how most people now meet the name: Valak is famous today as the demon of the modern horror films — the ghastly demon nun of the Conjuring universe, the pale and hooded figure of terror in The Conjuring 2 and its spinoff The Nun. The filmmakers took the name Valak from the Ars Goetia, and even nodded to this spirit's serpent-office in the titles they gave their creation; but the demon nun of the screen is a wholly invented fiction, and bears no resemblance whatever to the Volac the grimoire actually describes. This Vault sets the record straight gladly, for the distortion is a striking one. The cinematic Valak is a malevolent tormentor, a figure of dread designed to frighten; the true Volac is a winged child, gentle and innocent in form, whose offices are the finding of treasure and the charming of serpents into harmlessness. There is a deep irony in it: of all the seventy-two, Volac wears the most innocent shape of any — an angel-winged child — and it is precisely he whom the modern screen turned into one of its most frightening images. The films borrowed a real name and hung upon it a mask of their own making. This Vault, as always, tells the truth beneath the mask: the real spirit is no demon nun of nightmare but the gentle child who takes the venom out of the serpent. Those who come to Volac expecting the terror of the films will find, instead, something far stranger and far kinder.
Volac's form is a paradox held in a single image, and the paradox is the meaning. He is a child — innocent, small, unthreatening — and he bears the wings of an angel, the very sign of purity and grace; he is among the only spirits of the whole book to wear so gentle a shape. And yet this innocent winged child rides upon a two-headed dragon, the fearsome double-headed monster of terror and danger. The child does not fight the dragon or flee it; he sits upon it, rides it, masters it — and masters it not by strength, for a child has none against a dragon, but by an authority of another kind entirely, a fearless and innocent command. Here is the whole teaching of Volac in one picture: that the fearsome may be mastered by the gentle, that innocence may command what force cannot, that the child may ride the dragon. It is one of the most beautiful and instructive images in the Goetia — gentleness enthroned upon terror, mastering it without a blow.
Volac's most distinctive office is with serpents: he tells where they may be seen, and delivers them into the hands of the one who calls him void of any force or strength in themselves. He is the serpent-finder and, more, the serpent-charmer — the one who locates the venomous thing and then takes its venom and its force away, rendering it harmless and delivering it up tamed. This is of a piece with the child upon the dragon, for it is the same gift in another form: the disarming of the dangerous, the drawing of the sting, the mastery of the venomous not by killing it but by making it harmless. The serpent, in every tradition, is the sign of hidden danger, of venom, of the thing that strikes; and Volac is the spirit who finds it and disarms it, who takes it up in his hand with its force gone out of it. He does not war on the serpent. He charms it still.
Gather the child, the dragon, and the serpents together and Volac stands revealed as the spirit of gentle mastery over the fearsome — the disarmer of danger. This is his deep gift, and it is a rare and valuable one, for the world mostly meets what is fearsome with force, and answers threat with threat, venom with venom. Volac answers otherwise. He masters the dragon by riding it, not slaying it; he masters the serpent by charming out its venom, not crushing it; he disarms the danger rather than fighting it. Turned inward, as this Vault turns such gifts, this is a teaching of great worth: that one's own serpents — the venomous fears, the striking angers, the poisonous and frightening things that coil within — may be mastered not by force, not by the exhausting war against oneself, but by the gentler and surer art of disarming them, of taking the venom and the force out of them until they lie harmless in the hand. The fear faced with the child's fearless innocence loses its power to frighten; the venom drawn is a venom that cannot strike. Volac teaches the disarming of what is fearsome, within and without — the mastery that is gentle, and the courage that is a child's.
Volac also gives true answers of hidden treasures — where they lie, and how they may be found. It is the gentler and more straightforward of his offices, and it stands among the Goetia's several treasure-finders; but in Volac it carries a quiet resonance with the rest of him, for the treasure and the serpent are old companions in myth — the hoard is so often the thing the dragon guards, the serpent the keeper of the gold. Volac, who charms the serpent harmless, is fittingly also the one who reveals the treasure it kept; the same gentle mastery that disarms the guardian uncovers the hoard. Read inwardly, the hidden treasure he reveals may be the very thing one's own coiled fears were guarding — the worth or the possibility that the serpent of fear kept one from claiming, uncovered once the serpent is charmed.
Volac is placed in the element of Water and the quarter of the East — Water for the gentleness and the flowing, disarming quality of his nature. For the planetary correspondence this Vault reads him under Venus, and the reading turns on his winged-child form and his disarming power both. The winged child is, in the oldest imagery, Cupid — Eros, the winged boy who is the child of Venus herself, the very sign of the planet in a small and gentle shape. And Venus is, above all the planets, the disarmer: she is the power that takes the fight out of Mars, that softens the fierce and calms the raging, that masters the god of war not by a greater force but by a gentleness against which force has no answer. The old images show Mars laid down and disarmed beside her; and Volac, the child who disarms the dragon and charms the venom from the serpent, works Venus's own art of the gentle mastery of the fierce. His treasure-office, too, belongs to Venus, who rules the precious and the lovely. The two serpents and the dragon might, it is true, sound a Mercurial or a martial note — the caduceus, the fierce mount — but the spirit who tames them is Venus's own winged child. Set his metal as copper, his day as Friday, and his colours the dove-white of his innocent child-form and the dragon-green of the mount he masters. These correspondences are read as symbolic rather than handed down as documented tradition; the grimoires give only his element, his form, and his offices, and the Venusian reading follows from the winged child and the gentle disarming at the heart of them.
In the old demonology Volac is a well-regarded and much-noticed spirit, marked especially by his unusual and gentle child-form and by his particular mastery of serpents. Weyer and the Ars Goetia give the same account — the winged child, the two-headed dragon, the hidden treasures, the serpents found and delivered harmless. Commentators have long remarked on the strangeness of so innocent a shape among the fierce kings and monstrous beasts of the book, and on the fitness of the serpent-charmer to a child who rides a dragon. He is a President held in genuine regard, and in the modern age he has gained a strange second fame, borrowed and distorted, through the horror films that took his name.
Carried into the modern revival through the 1904 Mathers and Crowley edition — and into wider, if garbled, fame through the Conjuring films — Volac is worked today by those who look past the cinematic mask to the real spirit. Modern practitioners prize him for the finding of hidden treasure and, above all, for his gift of disarming what is fearsome: the taming of one's own serpents, the mastery of fear and venom by gentleness rather than force. His winged child upon the dragon is cherished as one of the most beautiful and hopeful images in the book, and the correcting of the horror-film distortion has become almost a rite of passage for those who come to know him truly. He remains a gentle, disarming, and quietly powerful President, nothing like the terror that bears his borrowed name.
Volac is gentle, fearless, and disarming — the winged child upon the two-headed dragon, the charmer of serpents, the master of the fearsome by a power that is not force. He finds the hidden treasure, tames the venomous serpent into harmlessness, and rides the dragon he does not fight, teaching by his very shape that innocence may command terror and that the gentle may master the fierce. He is nothing like the demon of the films that stole his name; he is stranger and kinder by far. Met with a wish to disarm rather than to war — to take the venom out of one's fears, to master the fearsome by gentleness, to uncover the treasure the serpent guarded — he is among the most quietly beautiful and valuable of all the spirits of the Goetia, the child who tames the dragon.
The grimoires give Volac one of the gentlest and strangest forms in the whole book: a child, with the wings of an angel, riding upon a two-headed dragon. He is innocent and small and winged like a cherub, and yet he sits upon the fearsome double-headed monster and masters it -- gentleness enthroned upon terror. It is worth stressing, against the modern horror-film image that has stolen his name, how far from frightening his true shape is: he is a winged child, not a demon nun of nightmare. Those who work with him describe a gentle, bright, disarming presence, unexpectedly innocent and light, with a quality of fearlessness about it -- the felt sense of a spirit before whom the fearsome loses its power to frighten, who takes the venom out of dread as he takes it out of the serpent. It is among the most benevolent and reassuring manifestations in the book, and among the most surprising to those who came expecting terror.
Enn: Avage secore on ca Volac
Working with Volac is working with the winged child who tames the serpent -- the gentle President who disarms what is fearsome, charms the venom from the serpent, finds the hidden treasure, and masters the dragon he rides by a power that is not force. He is nothing like the demon that bears his borrowed name in the horror films; he is gentle, bright, and disarming. This Vault comes to him to disarm rather than to war -- to take the venom out of fear, to master the fearsome by gentleness, to uncover what the serpent guarded. What follows is a guide built around that gentle mastery.
Come to Volac without the fear the films might have taught you, for his true nature is gentle and his form is that of an innocent winged child. Cleanse yourself and the space, and set his seal at the centre of the working. Where the correspondences are followed, the Venusian suits him: dove-white and dragon-green, the metal copper, the hours of Venus and of Friday. Then open the way by reciting his Enn -- Avage secore on ca Volac -- steadily, and let a gentle, bright, disarming presence gather, light and fearless rather than dreadful. Come to him in the spirit of his own gentleness, for it is the key to all he gives.
For his deepest gift, come to Volac with the venomous and frightening things that coil within you -- the striking fear, the poisonous anger, the dread that has its fangs in you -- and ask him not to help you slay them but to help you disarm them. This is the whole of his art: to take the venom and the force out of the fearsome thing, so that it lies harmless in the hand. Name the serpent honestly -- the particular fear or venom you would tame -- and ask him to draw its force, to charm it still, so that it can no longer strike you. Meet it, in his presence, with the child's fearlessness rather than with war, for the fear faced without force loses its power to frighten. This is a gentler and surer path than the exhausting battle against oneself, and it is his to teach.
More broadly, come to Volac when you face something fearsome -- a danger, a threat, a thing that frightens -- and would master it otherwise than by force. Ask him to teach you his art: to ride the dragon rather than fight it, to disarm the danger rather than war with it, to command by a fearless and gentle authority what strength could not. This is not passivity but a different and often surer kind of mastery, the child's mastery of the dragon; ask him to show you where, in your own fearsome things, the gentle disarming will succeed where force would fail.
For his treasure-office, ask Volac to give you true answer of where a hidden treasure lies -- and consider the inward form of it, for in him treasure and serpent go together. Ask him to charm the serpent of your fear that guards some worth or possibility in you, and then to reveal the treasure it kept -- the thing you could not claim while the fear coiled before it. Once the guardian is disarmed, the hoard it kept is his to uncover.
Practitioners describe Volac's presence as gentle, bright, and disarming, unexpectedly innocent and light, often with a felt easing of fear -- the sense of dread losing its grip, of the fearsome growing strangely harmless. When he has heard, his help tends to arrive as a disarming: a fear that no longer bites, a venomous feeling drawn and stilled, a danger mastered without a fight, a treasure uncovered once the fear that guarded it was charmed. Look for the sense that what frightened you has lost its power to frighten. Keep a written record of the serpents you have disarmed with him, for his gift unfolds as a growing fearlessness over time.
Volac asks few cautions, for he is gentle and benevolent. Come to him without the fear the films have wrongly attached to his name, and meet him in his own spirit of gentle mastery. Work his art as a disarming, not a war -- do not turn his serpent-charming into a fight against your own fears, for the whole of his gift is that the fearsome is mastered by gentleness and not by force. And do not mistake his gentleness for weakness; the child masters the dragon, and there is great power in his disarming. He is the winged child who tames the serpent, the disarmer of the fearsome, among the gentlest and most quietly powerful of all the spirits of the Goetia, and to the seeker who would master fear and venom by gentleness rather than force, he gives the rarest of masteries -- the child's fearless command of the dragon.