What is the angel and demon hierarchy in Supernatural?

Who sits at the very top?

God and Amara, and the decision to make them twins is the key to the whole map. For most of the run God is an absence: angels act in his name, argue about what he wants and assume he has left. When the series finally shows him, he has been living as Chuck Shurley, the writer the brothers first knew as a prophet in season 4, played by Rob Benedict. Amara, the Darkness, is the one power greater than his, and she is his sister rather than his opposite.

That choice turns cosmology into a family story, which is the register this show knows best. The archangels were made to fight her, and she was locked away behind the Mark of Cain, so everything below the two of them inherits an old quarrel nobody explains to the children. Two brothers on Earth, raised on the road by a father who taught them to hunt instead of explaining himself, end up fighting the same kind of argument at every rung up to the throne of Heaven, and the series plainly enjoys the echo.

Where do archangels stand compared with other angels?

Above all of them, by a wide margin. The four archangels are the first angels God made and the strongest, created in the order Michael, Lucifer, Raphael and Gabriel, and every angel after them is in effect a younger sibling. Every other angel ranks below them, in orders that include seraphim and cherubim. Castiel, the angel the series spends the most time with, is a seraph, a rank he is given after God brings him back at the end of season 5.

The difference shows in what it takes to end one. An ordinary angel can be killed with an angel blade, while an archangel needs a far rarer weapon, the archangel blade, and much of the angel story is about lesser angels trying to live through the quarrels of greater ones. Angels, like demons, also need a human vessel to act fully in the world, so the strongest beings in the show keep needing a person to carry them, and the archangel stories turn again and again on whether that person will say yes.

How is Hell's chain of command built?

From one act of spite. In the show's mythology a demon is a human soul that Hell has tortured until nothing human is left, and the first was Lilith, a woman whose soul Lucifer corrupted to prove a point about humanity. After her he made the four Princes of Hell, Azazel, Ramiel, Asmodeus and Dagon, as the first generation and the commanders of his forces. The Knights of Hell were a separate elite he picked by hand, trained by Cain, the first Knight. Below them sit the crossroads demons who trade wishes for souls and the black-eyed rank and file.

The series met this ladder from the bottom up, which is why it can feel improvised. Azazel is the great villain of the early seasons long before the show calls him one of four princes, and the Knights only appear once the story needs an enemy older than anything the brothers have beaten. Seen whole, the order holds together: each new rank arrives when the one beneath it has been dealt with.

Where does a King of Hell fit?

The Ruler of Hell is a title rather than a species, and the show passes it around. Azazel held it, then Lilith; once Lucifer was locked in his Cage again at the end of season 5, the Prince Ramiel turned the throne down and told Crowley, a former crossroads demon, to take it himself. Crowley ran Hell like a business built on contracts, until Abaddon, a Knight of Hell, came back to fight him for it. Later holders include Asmodeus, the last of the Princes, and the witch Rowena.

That is the pattern of the whole hierarchy: in Supernatural rank is never settled by title alone. Angels defy archangels, a Knight sneers at a king who started out bargaining at crossroads, and God himself turns out to have opinions his creation has no duty to share. The ladder is drawn carefully, but almost every story told on it is about somebody climbing off their rung.

What happens to angels and demons when they die?

They go to the Empty, the last place the show added to its map. People have Heaven and Hell and monsters have Purgatory, but for years a dead angel or demon simply stopped appearing. The Empty is first named in season 11 and first seen in season 13: a dark void, older than God and the Darkness, where dead angels and demons sleep for good under the watch of an entity called the Shadow. Nobody is supposed to come back from it, and Castiel becomes the first being who does.