#sorry this turned into a disjointed ramble about the history of angelology i just find it very interesting

[cringefailvox]

Personally, for Hazbin Hotel, I'm dying to know more about the angelic hierarchy. I know bible lore well enough to know that they're hiding something:

Sera says that she's the highest ranking angel, directly below the Metatron. Except she's a seraph. There should be an angelic rank between them that doesn't quite translate into English. I want to find out where Michael (canonically the highest ranking angel and archenemy of the Devil) and the other Princes of Heaven went lmao. The rank for them in Hebrew is "sārīm" but I think Christianity just uses 'Archangels' with a capital A to differentiate from typical low ranking archangels.

MAYBE they cameo'd? I'm assuming they're the six Tall Imposing Angels we see looking down on Lucifer and sentencing him during 'More Than Anything'. And the New Testament specifically refers to Michael as being the one to cast him out of Heaven. There are seven Princes in total and, hey, adding Samael/Lucifer to those Six Tall Imposing Angels would make that number work! Plus Paradise Lost claims that he was a Prince before Falling.

i'll be honest, i know comparatively little about christian angelology or mysticism, so i can't weigh on this very much. i will say though that in judaism, there's no formal angelic hierarchy until maimonides, a middle ages torah scholar that derived ten angelic ranks from a variety of biblical verses, but it doesn't translate 1:1 to any christian interpretations of those same texts since jews discount the new testament and apocrypha. sarim in hebrew can be rendered as princes, extremely vaguely, but it more accurately translates to ministers or chiefs, denoting leadership in general rather than any specific royal status. it also only refers to angels in the book of enoch, which is a very controversial text to say the least and not considered to be scriptural canon in any religion but the ethiopian & eritrean orthodox churches, so i'm not sure how relevant it'll be with hazbin specifically

also, seraphim are considered the highest ranking angels in traditional catholic angelology, there's no class higher than them. the archangel thing is weird in general too since the most influential christian angelic hierarchy, put forth by pseudo-dionysus the areopagite in the fifth century, lists them as second-to-lowest, yet most media places them at the top for some reason. idk! i truly have no idea where hazbin will go with any of this since we're already playing in a sandbox universe that's more like a subversive mishmash of paradise lost & dante's inferno rather than a loyal adaptation of christian canon, so i really doubt that any attempts to read angelic rankings into the lore of hellaverse will go anywhere useful

still an interesting idea though and there's a lot of fun ways to toy with these theories! my main point is that i personally don't think the actual show will engage very much with these concepts, or will only do so selectively, because that's not the kind of story hazbin seems interested in telling