Witch trials, or some variation of them, are a common motif throughout the early modern period in Europe and North America. Over a period of centuries, tens of thousands of women (and some men, too) were accused of witchcraft, trialed, and many of them executed. The bulk of these trials took place in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Those convicted of witchcraft were either hanged, drowned, or burned at the stake.
Most of the people accused of witchcraft at this time were in fact acquitted, but many ended up being killed anyway in lynchings after they were freed. One particularly interesting example is the case of Mary Webster, a woman in Massachusetts, who was strung up and left there overnight to die, but actually survived her hanging.
The fear of witches, and the belief in their existence, depended very much on the belief in an invisible world. The idea that there is some supernatural spiritual field that can be disturbed by witches, presumed to be in league with the Devil, is almost pagan in form, which is why throughout the mediaeval period the idea of witchcraft was dismissed by Christians as a heretical belief. But by the time of the 16th Century, when witch trials started to become more common, beliefs had shifted and Christians started to believe in, and fear, the practisers of dark magic, including witches.
The witch trials were essentially a battle between the forces of Christianity and the forces of Paganism, which had already been going on for centuries. The Puritan witch hunters of the time essentially needed an enemy to vanquish, someone to blame various unfortunate events, such as illnesses or deaths or natural disasters, on – and these supposed witches were the obvious target. The idea of a person being ‘evil’ only appears to have been brought into play historically when the church wanted to get rid of people who posed a threat to their cultural dominance. They were in most cases women, often poorer and/or older women, who perhaps had reputations for being troublesome or displaying ‘unladylike’ behaviour. They were also likely to be women who practised herbal medicine or healing in their communities.
The witch is also an archetype. It is a shadow archetype, existing in the realm of the feminine, and represents the dark side of femininity, particularly the bad mother. Kate Bush describes the witch trials phenomenon as a “fear of women’s power”, a fear especially of these witches’ ability to seduce and manipulate people into committing evil acts. It was very much a fear of women’s sexuality as well — sex being another thing the Puritans were not so keen on — witches were said to have fornicated with the Devil, for instance.
“Waking the Witch” is the third track in Kate Bush’s conceptual sequence of songs The Ninth Wave. To recap what has happened up to this point: Our narrator has fallen asleep in the water while adrift at sea, and is now tumbling through a series of nightmares. This song depicts our narrator being persecuted by a witch hunter.
But first, there is a kind of interlude section which forms the first part of the song. It begins with a voice whispering:
“Wake up”
abruptly cutting off the end of the previous track. This initial section of the song is devoted to clips of different voices saying variations on the theme of ‘wake up’, backed by rumbling, echoing piano chords. In interviews, Bush states that this is meant to represent people visiting our narrator, who is deep in her subconscious, to try and wake her up: falling asleep in water puts you at risk of drowning. These voices could be interpreted as parts of her own psyche rallying to help her, or they could be people she actually knows in real life.
Bush brought in her parents, siblings, as well as studio collaborators Del Palmer and Brian Tench to provide many of the voices in this section of the track. Other of these voices come from elsewhere – one sounds like a schoolteacher reprimanding a snoozing pupil, another like a hotel clerk delivering an early morning call.
“A good morning, ma’am; your early morning call.”
“You must wake up!”
“Wake up”
“Wake up, man!”
“Wake up, child; pay attention!”
“Come on, wake up!”
“Wake up, love!”
Each clip is panned alternately to the left, right, and centre in the mix, to give the effect of the voices coming at our narrator (and, therefore, us) from multiple directions. Like a lot of what we’ve heard so far in The Ninth Wave, it sounds dream-like, or like a hallucination. The voices are all unrelated to each other, except for their meaning to our narrator, which is that they’re willing her to wake up out of her unconscious state and not drown.
“We should make the night, but see your little light’s alive”
This clip hearkens back to “And Dream of Sheep” with the mention of the ‘little light’ – light is another main theme in The Ninth Wave, along with water. In a literal sense the little light refers to the light on our narrator’s life jacket, blinking on and off so that she can be seen by potential rescuers. But it can also be a metaphor for the soul: the little light that shines inside each of us and keeps us going through difficult times.
Light is also a metaphor for the divine – in the Bible, God is often referred to in terms of light: “God is in light and in God there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). James refers to God as the “Father of Lights” (James 1:17). The being we call God is also a reflection of the inner wisdom each person possesses, the “still small voice”. Our narrator is in the midst of a life-threatening journey, and she is completely alone, left to battle with herself in order to survive a night in the ocean. The little light within is what is guiding her through this ordeal.
“Stop that lying and that sleeping in bed; get up!”
“Come on, get yourself out of that bed!”
Briefly we return to the imperatives to awaken, except this time they’ve shifted from simply waking up to actually getting up and out of bed. Then the light comes back:
“Little light…”
Not only is our narrator trying to wake up, but she is trying to maintain a connection with that ‘little light’. This line is sung by Bush, in the exact same pitches as back in “And Dream of Sheep”.
“Can you not see that little light up there?”
“Where?”
“There!”
“Where?”
“Over here!”
Now the little light appears to be a star in the night sky, and we hear a dialogue between two voices, one of whom is trying to show the other where the light is. ‘Over here’ is spoken by someone else, and is a reference forwards to a later song in the suite, “Jig of Life”. Throughout this bit we also hear the sound of whale song, the obvious connection being that they’re marine animals — but it could also possibly be a reference to another song of Bush’s called “Moving”, which is, incidentally, the first song on her first album, The Kick Inside, which also uses whale song. There could be something here about origins, going back to the beginning, perhaps a wish to start over. If we take the ‘little light’ to mean the soul, and the soul is the oldest part of us, the origin of our being, it could connect to that as well.
“You still in bed?”
“Wake up, sleepy head!”
“We are of the going water and the gone.
We are of water in the holy land of water”
The latter two lines are again a reference to “Jig of Life”, and they’re spoken by a group of people in a low murmur, almost like a congregation reciting a prayer in church. There’s a lot to say about it, but I think I’ll save it for when I get to the song itself.
“Don’t you know you’ve kept him waiting?”
“Look who’s here to see you!”
These are the last lines of this section, and here the imperatives turn towards a person whom our narrator is supposed to be meeting. It’s unclear who exactly this person is — but we soon find out.
At this point the song breaks out, rather jarringly, into a different mood entirely. The voices trying to wake our narrator have not succeeded, and the ethereal space she was in gives way as she is plunged into another nightmare. The music for the rest of the song is a traditional rock band setup: drums, guitar, bass, and keyboards. Kate worked closely with guitarist Alan Murphy to write the music for this song, as she felt writing it on a keyboard instrument would have the wrong effect. As was typical of her process at this time, they went track by track, building up instruments and textures to create the song’s ominous, dark atmosphere.
As the intro plays out, we hear Bush’s voice cutting in and out – an effect achieved by rapidly opening and closing a noise gate – saying:
Listen to me, listen to me, baby
Help me, help me, baby
Talk to me, talk to me
Please, please, talk to me
It’s unclear who exactly she’s talking to, but clearly she’s pleading for help. This choppy vocal effect is prominent in this song, and the next one, “Watching You Without Me”.
As I mentioned earlier, our narrator’s dream self in this song is being persecuted for witchcraft. The witch trials reached their peak in Britain during the English Civil War, and extended well into the mid-17th Century. The then-monarch James I signed into effect the Act Against Witchcraft at the beginning of the 17th Century, which wasn’t the first witchcraft act in Britain, but it was the most notorious and stoked the most anti-witch fervour among the population. Interestingly, Scotland had a much higher rate of witch accusations and executions than England, a rate which was well above the European average. The most notable witch trials of this period in Britain include the Pendle witch trials in Lancashire, England, and the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland.
This places us in a specific time period which is well before the time in which our narrator seems to be living. There’s no indication of when exactly The Ninth Wave takes place, but it’s at least during a time in which life jackets and helicopters exist. The Hounds of Love album was released in 1985, so let’s assume it takes place around then. But, of course, this song is a dream, so it could take place at a different time in history.
It could be that our narrator is reliving an event from a past life where she was in fact trialled as a witch. Or it could be a manifestation of a woman’s anxiety, since the vast majority of accused witches were women. No doubt the witch trials would have had knock-on generational effects, and since the witch trials are considered one of the foundational events of the early modern period, it’s likely that the idea of the witch hunt is lodged in the psyches of quite a lot of women. The persecution, the injustice, the fear about whether or not it would be you next who was accused, must have been pretty terrifying.
As the song kicks into gear, a monstrous, deep and gravelly voice enters. At a surface level this voice appears to be the voice of the witch hunter, but its huge, all-encompassing nature could indicate it to be the voice of God: the whole point of these witch hunts was to invoke God as a weapon.
“You won’t burn” (Red red roses)
“You won’t bleed” (Pinks and posies)
“Confess to me, girl” (Red red roses, go down)
The witch hunter has evidently tried to burn her and make her bleed, but it hasn’t worked. All kinds of physical abuses were used as devices of torture in order to extract a confession from an accused witch. Those who did give confessions were usually so delirious and traumatised by the end that they would say whatever they were asked to.
The parts in brackets are references to a sea shanty called “Blood Red Roses”, which appears notably in the 1957 film adaptation of Moby Dick. Sea shanties were sung, usually by groups of men, while working on boats to liven up the drudgery of manual labour. Work songs in general were common and appear to be cross-cultural. Another example from Britain is the Scottish waulking songs, which were sung by women in the Hebrides as they did finishing work on tweed fabrics. Songs of this kind were sung to coordinate rhythm between a group of people working on the same task, and they also created a sense of togetherness and camaraderie which probably helped them finish the tasks. While work songs now seem to have gone out of fashion, many survive as folk songs. And since Kate Bush grew up with folk music in the family, she likely would have heard songs such as “Blood Red Roses”.
It’s never explicitly mentioned in the lyrics, but what’s happening in “Waking the Witch” is that our narrator, who stands accused, after not burning and not bleeding, is being drowned instead. The ‘swimming’ of witches was a common technique during the witch hunts to determine whether or not someone was guilty of witchcraft. Accused witches had their wrists and ankles bound and were dropped into a body of water with weights attached to them. Water, a symbol of purity (and femininity), was said to reject those who had sullied themselves by making alliances with the Devil. If they sank, they were innocent; if they floated, it meant they really were a witch and they would be executed. You’ll notice that they are doomed either way: even if they’re proved innocent, they end up dead. (In rare cases, some people survived being ‘swam’ and were found innocent, but barely.)
This song as a whole involves a lot of switching back and forth between the interrogation by the witch hunter and these delirious reveries which our narrator seems to be having in the process. At this point the music shifts briefly, and we hear voices mumbling:
Spiritus sanctus in nomine…
This is a variation on a part of the Latin Mass in Christianity, translating to ‘In the name of the Holy Spirit’. The religious themes continue, with our narrator perhaps appealing to a higher power for rescue. We also hear the sound of church bells in the background. Many of the women accused of witchcraft were in fact practising Christians, even the healers and wise women who were perceived to be dealing in Pagan mysticism. The fact was that the old Pagan traditions of the British Isles coexisted relatively comfortably with Catholic Christianity for centuries, especially outside of England — though attempts were made to suppress Pagan customs, it was generally accepted that they couldn’t be eradicated entirely, and people were mostly allowed to go about their business as long as it didn’t impinge too much on their other duties.
This all changed with the Reformation. In the 16th Century a new church split from Catholicism, and the new doctrine, called Protestantism, was a lot more suspicious of Pagan beliefs, which were seen as frivolous at best, and heretical at worst. Wise women and healers became potential threats to the Church. This was the start of the rise in anxiety about witchcraft and devil-worship among the Puritans. A woman called Agnes Sampson, the first person to be executed for witchcraft in Scotland, an event which set off the witch hunts in earnest all over Britain, was a practising healer in a small Scottish village. She was apprehended, tried, and tortured in the court of James VI, the same man who would go on to become James I of Britain and sign into effect the Act Against Witchcraft.
“Poor little thing” (Red red roses)
“The blackbird” (Pinks and posies)
“Wings in the water” (Red red roses)
“Go down” (Pinks and posies)
Back to the interrogation – the witch hunter compares our narrator to a blackbird, helpless and drowning in the water. He rather sinisterly calls her ‘poor little thing’, almost as if she’s a child – though, that being said, children were accused of witchcraft, so it could well be that this dream self is a child. The ‘wings in the water’ could also be referring to water wings, another kind of floatation device in water in addition to a life jacket. Water wings are usually worn by children.
The blackbird becomes a motif through the rest of the song. It’s been speculated that there could be a connection here with a children’s novel called The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George, which was published in 1958 – incidentally, the same year Kate Bush was born. It also calls to mind the idea of familiars: animal spirits who are said to serve witches by performing various magical tasks. The common image of a familiar takes the form of a black cat, but it isn’t hard to imagine a black bird, or, indeed, a blackbird. Celtic folklore associates blackbirds with death and rebirth, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that they are most prominently heard at dawn and at dusk. In this sense, blackbirds are creatures of liminality, the boundaries between night and day, the places where transformations happen. This makes them perfect candidates for a witch’s familiar, witches being people who also tread that line between the world of the physical and the world of the supernatural.
Then we get another bit in Latin:
Deus et dei domino…
This means ‘God and Lord of Gods’. It doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in the Latin Mass, however, but for anyone who’s spent much time in church these words will be familiar, as they are used often. We hear the church bells again. Our narrator is further devoting herself to God in the hope that she can still be saved – only this time, instead of the Holy Spirit, which can be interpreted a number of different ways and can take a number of different forms, here she is speaking directly of God, who is the patriarchal figure we tend think of when it comes to Christianity. She is not just giving herself over to a higher power but to a male higher power. The reason witches were considered so threatening back in the 16th and 17th Centuries was because women at that time were not allowed to occupy positions of authority or power in the Church (except the Queen). By cracking down on witches, the Church was suppressing women’s freedom.
This reverie is then interrupted by a different voice, saying:
“What is it, child?”
It’s a phrase commonly used by priests in confession. And, as it happens, we then hear one:
Bless me, father, bless me, father,
For I have sinned…
The choppy, distorted voice is back. In Christianity, confession consists of a person confiding in a priest about the wrongdoings they have committed – their sins – which are then absolved by the priest. Often the confessor is instructed to recite prayers multiple times as penance. It’s a way of allowing the soul to be cleansed of guilt, ready for fresh sins to be committed. As a result, confession is usually a regular occurrence for the particularly faithful. A lot of Christian doctrine revolves around the idea that we are all sinners, born into a fallen world, exiled from the Garden of Eden along with Adam and Eve. Therefore, it is necessary in the church to construct ways of dealing with this, ways of redeeming yourself, and confession is a primary example of this.
Help me, baby, listen to me, listen to me, (Red red roses)
Tell them, baby! (Red red rose…)
Help me, baby! Talk to them!
What started out as a confession now turns into a plea for help, like we heard at the beginning. Our narrator is confessing to the witch hunter – you’ll recall earlier when he said, “Confess to me, girl”. But she could also be appealing to a priest, or to God, or to a lover, as suggested by the use of the word ‘baby’. Perhaps all of these are the same person.
One of the ambiguities in this song is the age of our narrator’s dream self. There are parts which suggest that she is a child, as I mentioned earlier, but other parts, like when we hear her speaking, suggest that she isn’t one. Dreams themselves can be ambiguous like that.
Then the monstrous voice returns:
“I question your innocence”
This seems pretty straightforward, but — one of the classical ways of interpreting dreams is to treat each character in the dream as a part of one singular psyche, that is, the one of the dreamer. This could mean then that our narrator is questioning her own innocence, wondering what she may have done in a past life that she is not aware of. It’s a kind of accumulation of karmic debt. The gaslighting techniques witch hunters used on their victims preyed on the fact that we can never be entirely sure if we are in fact innocent. No-one is pure; we all do cruel things without realising that we are doing them. Witches under torture were often broken down in this way: telling them they were guilty until they started to truly believe it themselves.
“She’s a witch”
(Help this blackbird!)
(There’s a stone around my leg)
“Damn you, woman!”
This is the first time we hear the word ‘witch’ in the song, when we’re nearly at the end of it. And from here the music starts to ramp up, with synths entering the mix and the voice of the witch hunter growing more irate. The image of the blackbird returns, this time our narrator identifying with it herself. The stone around her leg refers to the weights attached to alleged witches who were being plunged into water.
Then, we find out that our narrator is being tried in a court, with onlookers.
“What say you, good people?”
“Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”
Her sentence is handed down, and a thundering roll of drums hammers like a gavel. Then comes a strange line:
“I am responsible for your actions”
Now why would a witch hunter say that he is the one responsible for the supposed wrongdoings of a witch? Is it because he failed to stamp out these bad deeds before they were done? Or is it like the way some parents think they are responsible for the actions of their children, which they use to justify their cruelties? Jesus is said to have ‘died for our sins’. This means that, according to the story, he ultimately bears responsibility for the acts of ordinary people. Could that also be a factor here?
The line after that is rather indecipherable, but my best guess is that it says:
“I’m guilty”
So now the witch hunter is saying that he is guilty, right after our narrator is proclaimed so by the court. Perhaps he is feeling remorse for his part in her persecution, or now feels the weight of what he has done, which is condemn her to death. We often project our own guilt onto other people by deeming them to be bad – perhaps this is a case of that.
“Wake the witch”
Now we can get into what exactly is meant by ‘waking the witch’, as the title says. The most obvious interpretation would be that the witch is wakened by finding her out, through interrogation. This presumes that there is a witch inside the person who needs to be discovered, or agitated enough so that they reveal themselves. The waking of the witch happens then on an internal level.
Alternatively, it could be talking about the witch as an archetype, invoking the image and the power of the witch in the collective sphere and implanting it into a person of their choosing. This is essentially what happened during the witch hunts. There’s also the fact that our narrator, who has fallen asleep in the water, is trying to wake up so that she doesn’t drown. If she is in fact the witch, it could be that the figures in the dream (as well as the voices we heard at the beginning) are trying to wake her up out of her dream. But this is all open to interpretation.
As the song reaches its conclusion, we hear the sound of a helicopter. Kate Bush searched for the perfect helicopter sound to use here, but could not find the right one. In the end she borrowed the helicopter sound from Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall”, which was recorded by producer Bob Ezrin. It presumably represents what’s happening in the real world as our narrator tumbles through her nightmares: by now people would probably be looking for her, and there was an allusion to a Sea King aircraft back in “And Dream of Sheep”.
Then we hear yet another voice, calling:
“Get out of the waves!
Get out of the water!”
This is another reference forwards, this time to “Hello Earth”, and is pretty self-explanatory: our narrator should get out of the water as soon as possible if she wants to live. But her journey is far from over yet. The song fades out, and on she goes.
Well, that brings us, at long last, to the end of this song. I appreciate you sticking it out all the way to the end. This is probably the densest song in the entire suite, and required a lot of research to pick apart. I hope you can join me next time, when we get a peek into our narrator’s home life in “Watching You Without Me”.