A Guide to Winged Angelology

This wooden cherub of nineteenth-century vintage once adorned a house transported from the abandoned settlement in Kenozero National Park. It may well have survived from the furnishings of the local St Elijah chapel, now preserved and exhibited at the Malyye Korely Museum near Arkhangelsk. Have you ever visited? I highly recommend it.

And here we have another fragment from the painted wooden “heavens” of the Kenozero region. (If you have not done so already, do read my previous essay on the subject.) On this particular panel, discovered by a resident of the village of Pocha in his own shed back in the 1980s, we find depicted a seraph.

Do you recall the majestic vision in the Sixth Chapter of Isaiah?

Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.

Lest you accuse me of blasphemy, I must confess this particular face of the six-winged creature irresistibly brings to mind young Lenin’s in the centre of the five-pointed star of the Little Octobrist‘s pin. Or is it merely my own whimsical, irreverent imagination?

Be that as it may, do you actually know who cherubim and seraphim are, and how precisely one distinguishes the two? Let us unravel this celestial hierarchy together.

The Heavenly Hierarchy: From Babylon to Mozart

There exists, should you be unaware, an entire discipline devoted to the study of the heavenly host: angelology. Among its chief pursuits is the mapping of the angelic ranks. Admittedly, no single, universally accepted system exists; theologians in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have devised as many variations as there were scholars to debate them. Yet across every tradition, two celestial orders remain immutable: the cherubim and the seraphim.

In Hebrew, שְׂרָפִים‎ (kruvím) is simply the plural of כְּרוּב (kruv). In English the singular form was preserved directly via Latin: cherub, and the plural kept the Hebrew ending -im.

Do you remember Count Almaviva’s youthful, romantic page in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro? His name is Cherubino—which is to say, quite literally, “the little cherub.”

The application of “cherub” to angelic, rosy-cheeked youths traces its origin back to the Talmudists, who erroneously derived the word’s etymology from the Aramaic kervya, meaning “like a youth.” In all probability, however, the word cherub originates from an Akkadian verbal form signifying “one who prays” or “one who blesses.” This is hardly surprising, given that the Israelites brought back their whole host of spirits—along with their division into “upper” and “lower” realms—from the Babylonian captivity.

How Many Wings, Exactly?

In the Old Testament, cherubim appear with remarkable frequency. In the Book of Genesis, a cherub armed with a flaming sword guards the entrance to the Garden of Eden; King David depicts them as the very chariot of the Almighty: “He rode upon a cherub, and did fly.” In the Books of Samuel and Kings, as well as in Isaiah, God is repeatedly described as “He who sits enthroned upon the cherubim.”

Yet their outward appearance varies wildly from text to text. In the Book of Exodus and the First Book of Kings, they possess a single face and a single pair of wings. The Prophet Ezekiel, on the other hand, presents us with a far more exotic vision: four-winged creatures with the feet of a calf, gleaming like burnished brass, endowed with four human hands beneath their wings, and possessing four distinct faces—those of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle.

The word seraph, meanwhile, derives from the Hebrew שְׂרָפִים‎ (srafím, the plural of saráf, meaning “burning” or “fiery”). Unlike the frequently mentioned cherubim, seraphim appear in the biblical canon precisely once—in that selfsame vision of Isaiah:

Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.

It is this terrifying, transformative encounter—the purging of a mortal’s tongue with heavenly fire—that provided the ultimate biblical blueprint for the literary archetype of the divine messenger and the visionary poet.

The Iconographer’s Field Guide: Key Differences

If we set aside centuries of dense theological disputation, the visual tradition of Christian art reduces the distinction between the two ranks to two primary rules of thumb:

1. The Number of Wings. With seraphim, the rule is absolute and unyielding: they possess precisely six wings. With cherubim, textual descriptions may vary, but within the canonical hierarchy of the Church, seraphim occupy the first and highest order, closest to the Divine Throne. Cherubim hold the second rank and consequently possess one pair fewer—meaning they are depicted with four wings.
2. Colour and Symbolism. Seraphim are the “fiery ones”; thus, iconographers almost invariably paint them in a blazing, vermilion red (as seen in the fragment of the “heavens” from Pocha). Cherubim, by contrast, symbolize divine foreknowledge and wisdom; their name was associated with the fullness of knowledge, and in sacred art they are traditionally rendered in serene, cool tones—most commonly blues, golds, or soft grays.

Equipped with these two criteria, the next time you find yourself contemplating ancient frescoes or the soaring ceilings of a historic chapel, you will easily identify precisely which celestial being is gazing down upon you from the heights.

CHERUB OR SERAPH? A CHEAT SHEET