What are the tiers of angelic and demonic ranking?

Question

There are some clear divisions of power in Supernatural, amongst demons and angels.

Who is at the top of the chain for both? Who are the next few significant ranks?

I know at the top for Angels we have

Lucifer -> Michael and Gabriel....

And demons I think we have/had:

Azazel ->Lilith->Crowly?

But I'm not certain.

Answer 1

This is rather crude, a lot of it comes with caveats, I left out a ton of entities and am sure I've forgotten some relationships. Most of the information is from my own memory and supplemented by the Supernatural Wikia.

In general, Entity 1 → Entity 2 means Entity 1 is more powerful than Entity 2.

Other "relationships", like War being above Pestilence in the image, don't mean anything - that just happens to be where they were placed.

• Death claims to be older than God, and that he will reap God when he dies. This relationship is uncertain, though, given the sheer age of it.
• Leviathan and Castiel is questionable, since now that they're not organized, Leviathan are, in Crowley's words, just a difficult-to-kill monster, mostly like any other.
• Michael is the one who trapped Lucifer originally, and is the one prophesied to kill Lucifer.
• Castiel and Famine? Hundreds of hamburgers.
• Alastair once captured several reapers and was prepared to kill them.
• Hellhounds can easily kill demons, but it is unknown how high up the food chain. The black-eyed demons tend to be the weakest, so that's where I put them.
• I've put the Mother of All above Castiel, since we know she's older than angels, and can block their powers. However, I don't recall her interacting with the Archangels, so they may or may not be immune to that ability.

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_{For the sake of allowing anyone to be able to edit the image, I generated it using Graphviz, with this dot file.}

Answer 2

Supernatural is just like any other television show with a vast cast and varying levels of superhuman ability. Likely no one sits down and creates a major graph of how is the most powerful and new characters appear whose powers challenge the previous top dogs who, at the time were considered the most powerful forces in the series. So is there a real potential to determine who is the most powerful, or is this mostly a fan exercise that the writers of the series barely pay attention to because they have to create a series every week and just don't have time.

All things considered, Supernatural does a fairly good job of remembering who is on top and why.

• God, Yahweh is on top, though we have never seen him/her (that we know of) we know the Universe came to be and the Angels are the unhappy caretakers of what's left since he/she has disappeared.

• Archangel Michael has proven to be the next largest dog on the porch and the only person who has the raw power and ability to handle Lucifer, the First Fallen Archangel and de facto ruler of Hell, even if he rules in absentia.

• The other Archangels are the Powers who rule Heaven in God's place. They are fractious, unhappy and wonder what happened to make God forsake them. A few even try to engineer the Apocalypse in order to reset the Earth and maybe drive God out of hiding; it doesn't work.

• A strange outlier is Death. He claims to be outside of the power structure that Angels and Demons participate in. He claims that he will one day reap God, but I took that statement to be hyperbole since he is a part of the Universe, he had to have come into existence when God did. So I don't believe he would be able to "reap" God, but certainly the two of them will leave the Universe when that time comes together. Everything else, in the Universe, may be fair game to him, making him a scary force that everyone makes an effort to avoid. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse on the other hand appear to be cannon fodder recruited from human lives and given powers to help them promote their office.

• Other Angels: Now it gets murky. Religious texts indicate there are three tiers of angels but we don't ever hear the angels really talk about this, so besides the Archangels we are forced to assume the difference is mostly cosmetic from the scale of the humans who see them. First Sphere and Second Sphere Angels are mentioned in the Bible, visit humans, deliver catastrophes and divine edicts. I start at the third tier of power with this being the level of Angels we see all the time. Third Tier angels are powerful and most other beings fear them. Even powerful monsters and named Demons avoid the attention of even Third Tier Angels.

• Third Tier Angels: Even with their power level, we see Third Tier Angels get wacked by other Angels, demons and even humans armed with Angel Killing Swords. They can be killed by surprise, they can be sent back to Heaven with Enochian symbols and this means their superhuman abilities are not perfect.

• The Reapers populate a tier of power between Demons and Other soul harvesting artifacts. They seem to function like Angels but work exclusively for Death. This might also be the same tier of power the Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to function at. Deriving some of their power from Death, the Horsemen seem to have a power level equal to that of Named Demons.

• Below them would be creatures like the Purgatory Monsters who had an entire reality created to keep them away from everything else in our universe. These include creatures like the Leviathans and Eve. These creatures are powerful enough that even named Demons, Leader Demons, and Leader Monsters are not happy to see them and do everything in their power to make them go away. A single Leviathan has proven to be a match for any demon, any third tier Angel and any monster walking the planet, hence the reason for their imprisonment.

• Specials and Uniques: Individual artifacts, weapons, weaponized people and unique monsters populate this tier. This includes the Eve, the Antichrist, the Special Children, of which Sam was a member, The Colt, and the Scythe of Death. Looking at the Scythe and Colt, if used by the right hands or with the right knowledge claim to be able to kill almost anything.

• Demons and Monsters populate the lowest tier of monsterdom in the Supernatural Universe. These are the creatures that Hunters cut their teeth on and if they survive eventually draw the attention of the Demon Leaders and Monster Leaders, the creatures of legend.

At the bottom of this list is the lowly Human, food source for most monsters, but blessed with the benefit of a soul for which most monster seek for nourishment, fuel, money, or magical power. Despite their food status, humans when properly trained and equipped with sufficient knowledge can be a formidable foe, capable of holding its own against all but the most powerful of these creatures. No individual human is particularly powerful, but they can learn magic, bind and hold demons, destroy and kill most monsters and using the right technology hold most non-angelic creatures at bay.

This is an imperfect list, just like Supernatural is an imperfect show. For the most part they do a pretty good job of keeping their power structure intact.

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Answer 3

!Among the angels, Michael is clearly the most powerful. This can be seen in the final showdown between him and Lucifer. Lucifer acknowledges that it is, at best, a longshot that he should triumph, but feels compelled to fight anyway. In earlier episodes though, to other people/angels, Lucifer would be full of bravado, probably an attempt to convince himself that he could win.

!Second to him though he might be, Lucifer is an incredible power that lays waste to many beings considered deities. And not one-on-one either, they pile on to him... and he just smites them. Furthermore, while Lucifer is clearly no match for Death (Incarnate), he does manage to trick Death with magic that enslaves him. Whether this should be considered impressive or not I leave to you the reader, after all, a junkyard owner manages to accomplish the same thing later in the series.

!Next in line would be two more angels, Raphael and Gabriel. We are never given any clues as to which is stronger than the other. But both are archangels proper, and in theory capable of killing Lucifer and/or Michael (something no ordinary angel could ever manage). It seems likely that they might manage this without their angelic blades (swords of archangels, and all that), but they are armed with the means to do so at the very least.

!Next in line I would put post-resurrection (second time) Castiel. He was somewhat lowly originally, but he is quite clearly capable of resurrecting the dead after the end of season 5. While Raphael was probably still capable of smiting him, I suspect that it might have been just a bit more difficult than it would with any other angel.

!Now, compared to demons... even the lowliest angel seems both capable of smiting them and invulnerable. Alistair (a powerful demon as far as they go) laments that he cannot kill them, only send them back to Heaven temporarily.

!Crowley seems much more powerful in seasons 6 and 7, but it is revealed that he has the help of Castiel to some degree or another, and can marshal the forces of Hell in their entirety.

!I suspect that Ruby, Lilith, and Azazel were never as powerful as Crowley is in later seasons. They knew esoteric magic and might be able to interfere with powers greater than themselves (for a few moments anyway), but they are all dead and Crowley remains.

!Meg is savvy, but does not seem particularly adept at the black magic that might make her more powerful. If you ask Crowley for the spell to bind Death, 24 hours later you have a parchment in your hands. But Meg has only ever used blood to communicate with other demons.

!No other still-living (wrong word? still-existing?) demons are even named.

!It's unclear where the Hell-forged knife comes from. Demons may have constructed it, or merely came into possession of it at some point in the past.

Answer 4

I think this power chart but have a few alterations. Michael WAS stronger than lucifer initially but this could have easily been a shock to an unprepared lucifer"why brother why I don't wanna right" a sentiment he later expresses at the end. Also lucifer could have gained power being in hell. Angela and I assume archangels get their juice from heaven and the collective souls there. Maybe archs have their own battery thru a connection to God, and heaven may have a resovoir of power aside from souls after all that's a lotta angels and a finite number of souls in heaven. Meanwhile lucifer was the only angel in hell, even if demons don't provide as much juice as untainted souls he had the whole thing to himself. Keep in mind he needed a powerful psychic drinking demon blood to strengthen himself in vessel form without deteriorating, nick only drank demon blood he wasn't a psykid. I think lucifer was atleast on even terms and possibly stronger than Michael at the end. As for Crowley being stronger than the white eyed demons and azazel i call bullshit. In his season 6 he mentioned his position wasn't stable and even as the strongest crossroads demon he was still a red eye, albeit with red smoke form. I assume he elevated to the rank of say alastair, maybe even Azazel who was described as the tyrant ruler of demons (king of hell at time) lillith may have been stronger it's up to debate i still think yellow eyes signify fallen angel status, think Anna or castiel. What If they died as evil humans. Azazel was the only demon to ever be immune to salt and holy water, a possible carryover from his non human origin? Iron couldn't be crossed and devils traps may have worked but who knows, and simon minor angel mojo plus millennia of hell cloud churn out a powerful demon. Samhain I assume is just under Alastair in power. Id reckokn samhainn could throw down with a mook angel if not the likes of uriel or castiel, that is unless his lirtkw reicks let him use ghosts and or zombies as distractions while he used a chant like alastaie did to send em back upstairs assuming he knows the spell. And as for castiel i think he got two power boosts, one as a reward for helping Sam

And dean, And then another once Crowley gave him 50,000 souls from hell. I believe he was as strong or probably stronger than Zachariah , meaning a weaker arch like raph couldn't smite him like before hence him frying the angel sword. Purgatory cas aka godstiel was A full order stronger than an archangel atleast to raphael, and seemed fo think he could kill Death. Maybe not but he'd probably be able to bind him on his own atleast if not hurt him somehow. I also like to believe that the other 3 horsemen were human once, maybe being quasi demons imbued with some of Death's essence, tied to their ring and taking on the personification. I think an archangel or maybe godstiel if he hasn't ingested them, could have killed or atleast disentegrated some leviathans. Maybe only dick being immune but he not having the power to do much against them itd Be a stalemate, unless they could just toss him on the moon or maybe back to purgatory for that matter.