Bestiaries were medieval theological works that illustrated and described animals in moral and theological terms so as to emphasize particular qualities of salvation or Christian teachings. (And as modern theology-of-animals defenders might also note, so as to schematize the place of animals, fanciful or real, in the economy of salvation.)

So, too, no one with theological awareness can fail to note the provocative character of the “bestiary” of “rock animals” — that is, living entities from rock culture (musicians, fans, roadies, and more) that are picture-able and catalogue-able — bearing some promise of spiritual insight.

I first had this idea when reading musicologist Susan Fast’s breakthrough study: In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford, 2001). There, Dr. Fast shows how the musical authority of Led Zeppelin, which is not separate from its sexual, gendered, and even spiritual power, is bound up with the bodily positions characteristically taken up by Zeppelin’s members, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in particular. Her book revolutionarily includes several pages of sketches of postures of Plant and Page from live shows, with accompanying commentary. Here, I thought, is the raw material for a contemporary bestiary.

Much more needs to be said about this idea. I have already begun on R&T to promote a kind of moving bestiary by proposing the idea of a “somatica divina” or attention to divine (rock) bodies through the “somatica” series here, with some explication of the idea to be found here.

But now with the notion of “bestiary,” I want to signal the pictured “rock animals” as moral teachers of a kind, but above all as possible soundboards for a theological life today. Here the picture, still and framed, becomes the possible rock icon (and/or idol). Here we meditate on the gesture, the act, the pose, the singular bodily conclave. (We can even start with the observation that many rock fans have not only deep attachments to whole concerts or songs, but also to specific pictures of fan culture or rock performance, in which a facial expression, hip pitch, or conjunction of hands is, in short, everything.)

A brief verbal description and/or picture will suffice to begin, slowly, building the catalogue.

In what will our rock bestiary consist?

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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