What are the Angels in Evangelion?

The Angels are the antagonists of Evangelion: beings of immense power that appear one by one and move toward Tokyo-3 and the NERV headquarters beneath it. Within the fiction they are connected to the same origins as humanity, a relationship the series reveals slowly, and their goal is contact with the entity imprisoned under the city, which NERV believes would trigger a world ending Third Impact.

The roster is a design catalogue. Sachiel walks like a man and weeps explosives, Ramiel is a floating geometric solid that drills, Matarael rains acid, Leliel is a shadow whose body is elsewhere, and Bardiel is a fungus that hijacks an Evangelion itself. The final Angel, Tabris, is Kaworu Nagisa, who arrives as a friendly boy rather than a monster, which reframes every battle before it.

The one at a time structure came from the monster of the week grammar of earlier giant robot television, and Evangelion uses the familiarity deliberately: early victories build confidence that the middle episodes systematically destroy, as Angels begin attacking the pilots' minds and relationships rather than the city. By the end, the military question of how to kill an Angel has been replaced by the question of what the Angels and the pilots actually are.

Reference works catalogue the Angels by number, from Adam and Lilith through to Tabris, and Japanese publications are consistent about that numbering even where English sources vary. Collectors meeting Angel imagery on merchandise should use the number and name together, since designs were reused and reinterpreted across the television series, the Sadamoto manga and the Rebuild films, where the classification system itself was changed.