Competing structures
Hierarchies
20 structures, 351 positions. There is no single ranking of angels or of demons — there are several, they contradict each other, and each reflects the concerns of the text that produced it. Set the nine choirs beside Maimonides’ ten ranks and the seraphim drop four places while the cherubim drop seven.
Ranked structure is not an Abrahamic peculiarity either. Egypt has the Ennead and the Hall of Two Truths, Zoroastrianism matches its good and evil powers rank for rank, and China organises the underworld as a civil service with ten courts and a right of appeal.
Celestial — Abrahamic
10 positions
The Great Archangels
The named chiefs, and the fault line running through them: Rome approved three in 745 and condemned the rest, while Jewish, Islamic and Enochian tradition each name a different four.
12 positions
The Nine Choirs
Pseudo-Dionysius' arrangement of nine choirs in three spheres, c. 500 CE. The default Christian angelology, and the scheme every later Western account either follows or argues with.
De Coelesti Hierarchia (The Celestial Hierarchy) · c. 500 CE
14 positions
The Offices of the Mala'ika
Islamic angelology ranks by function rather than by proximity to the throne, and holds one line firmly: angels have no capacity to disobey. That is why Iblis has to be jinn, and why Harut and Marut are so argued over.
Qur'an & Hadith · 7th c. CE onward
10 positions
The Ten Ranks
Maimonides' ten ranks, c. 1180 — a deliberate alternative to the Dionysian nine. Compare the two and the disagreement is unmissable: the seraphim fall from first to fifth and the cherubim from second to ninth.
Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah · c. 1180
Infernal — Abrahamic
88 positions
Ranks of the Seventy-Two
The Goetia gives each of its seventy-two spirits a rank borrowed from feudal nobility. Several hold two ranks jointly, and exactly one — Furcas — is a Knight.
The Lesser Key of Solomon, Book I: Ars Goetia · 17th c.; ed. 1904
14 positions
The Infernal Court
De Plancy's court, which arranges hell as a nineteenth-century European state complete with ministers, ambassadors and a grand admiral. The joke is deliberate.
Dictionnaire Infernal · 1818; illustrated ed. 1863
9 positions
The Nine Infernal Orders
Barrett's 1801 arrangement, built as a deliberate mirror of the nine celestial choirs — each order opposed to the choir it parodies.
The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer · 1801
7 positions
The Seven Princes and the Deadly Sins
Peter Binsfeld's 1589 assignment of one demon to each capital sin. Widely repeated as though it were ancient doctrine; it is a single early-modern author's scheme, and other writers of the same period assigned the sins quite differently.
Tractatus de Confessionibus Maleficorum et Sagarum · 1589
4 positions
The Ten Shells
Lurianic Kabbalah explains evil as residue rather than as a rival power: husks left when the vessels shattered and could not hold the light. A husk has no existence apart from what it encloses, which gives Judaism a ranked demonology without conceding dualism.
Etz Chaim & Lurianic Kabbalah · 16th c.
19 positions
The Three Infernal Hierarchies
Michaelis' 1613 scheme, and the earliest infernal structure in this corpus built against a celestial one. It mirrors Pseudo-Dionysius at the level of the three hierarchies rather than the nine choirs — which is the opposite half of the borrowing Barrett makes 188 years later, and neither man takes both. Each demon is paired with the saint said to have suffered its temptation without falling.
The Admirable History of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent Woman · 1613
Egyptian
30 positions
The Great Gods of Egypt
Three thousand years of religion did not run on one pantheon. Rival theologies at Heliopolis, Memphis and Thebes each had their own creator, and the household gods most Egyptians actually owned amulets of barely appear on temple walls.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead · c. 1550 BCE onward
12 positions
The Hall of Two Truths
Not a ranking but a procedure: what happens to an Egyptian after death, in order. The oldest detailed account of post-mortem judgment anywhere, and the ancestor of every weighing-of-souls image in Western art.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead · c. 1550 BCE onward
14 positions
The Heliopolitan Ennead
Nine gods in four generations, from Atum's self-creation to the four children whose quarrel becomes the Osiris myth. Egypt ran several creation accounts at once and treated them as complementary; this is the one from Heliopolis.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead · c. 1550 BCE onward