I am fascinated by the general habit in Western entertainment of depicting Heaven as a bureaucracy. Hell is also sometimes depicted as bureaucratic—The Screwtape Letters is a notable example, and there's Hellish bureaucrats in the superb Basque-language horror film Errementari (Paul Urkijo Alijo, 2017), and I'm sure there's a ton of anime examples. It's rather too easy to imagine there'd be demonic middle managers obsessed with policing the paperwork. And yet Heaven so often gets depicted as a hierarchy of managers as well—do Heaven and Hell really mirror each other like that?
There's a certain parallel with Gnosticism. My knowledge of Gnosticism is weak and derived mostly from Wikipedia, mind you—but I know at least there's a number of Gnostic systems, poorly documented because Gnosticism was heresy to mainstream Christianity and thus liable to suppression, which postulated the existence of a vast constellation of subordinate deities and subdivisions of Creation, a Creation which was more like a trap or a prison for human souls, with a false Creator as the prison warden. I'm also slightly reminded of the weirder side of Mormon theology, with its elaborate system of subordinate Heavens—it's really almost as though the Latter-Day Saints claim that you too can become a Gnostic Archon, with your own little realm to boss around. I don't know exactly how the Mormon elders came up with this stuff but I would assume it was through gnostic means, i.e. personal revelation, so it makes some sense that Mormon theology and Gnostic theology are a little similar.
To me, anyway, the Gnostic visions of a celestial hierarchy look suspiciously like the imprint of Roman civilization and rigid Roman timekeeping on the spiritual substance of Christianity. The numbers of Archons in various Gnostic systems line up with Roman calendar divisions—there's seven (like the days of the week), there's twelve (like the months), there's 365 in Basilidean Gnosticism (like the days of the year)—and it's tempting to speculate that the oppressed citizens of Rome, i.e. just the sort of person who might seek the comforts of a secret religious sect, were altogether too used to being ground into the dirt by ruthless Roman patricians and Roman authorities over issues of time. It's one of the most reliable weapons of tyranny: make everyone jump around according to rigid timetables, and punish anyone who isn't timely. Hence if Heaven's depicted as bureaucratic, maybe it's only because Rome was bureaucratic—and that's really depressing, that is. Surely we can do better than living in a divine, or diabolic, imitation of the Roman Empire.
~Chara