All three major religions of the Western world, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as virtually all of the world’s other systems of religious belief, include celestials in their cosmologies. Their scriptures all contain references to angelic interventions. Angels, like people, belong to families or clans. Many names have been given to them, but in the opinion of a number of angel historians, the most familiar can be arranged in three categories, or spheres, starting at the top with those closest to God, and moving down to those who are connected to the physical world.
The word ‘angel’ itself is used both as a generic term to refer to all heavenly beings, and as a specific term to refer to the members of the third sphere, those closest to the physical. So, too, the word ‘archangel’ is often used as a generic term to refer to all the high orders of heavenly beings, although they are in fact but one of the higher orders.
According to Abigrael, there are four orders within the heavenly hosts that particularly concern us now: angels, archangels, principalities, and thrones. …
While it looks like there is a higher and lower echelon, it’s more accurate to visualize all these orders in a great circle, with the highest and the lowest holding hands. For example, seraphim, who appear to be closest to the Creator, also serve the God in us.
~Gregg Prescott
I have always been loathe to work with angels, because I have viewed them as “yes men” for the demiurge. But I have been seeing a lot of interesting perspectives on them lately. Maybe they’re not all a bunch of goons and hit-men. I need to explore this more.