WASHINGTON — What’s it like to feel as though a White House witching hour never stops, a perilous predicament punctuated by twilight tweets of “witch hunt!” from the most powerful man on earth?
Ask the witches of Washington – it’s rough.
Across the Swamp and into the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, there are 50 self-identified witches – fully initiated members of the pan-pagan organization known as the Firefly House.
The group practices Wicca, a modern Pagan religion, and announces its gatherings on Meetup.com.
David Dashifen Kees assumes the air of a convivial computer programmer by day, but is also enrolled in Christian seminary by night. Add to that, Kees also serves as a Wicca priest.
In an interview Friday, Kees said gatherings of Washington witches are far from malevolent or menacing, but are geared towards a reverence of nature and a creation of a more hospitable world for all.
Yet Kees noted there are indeed moments when the witches discuss President Trump, invoking spells, spiritual attention and self-empowerment to confront the president’s perceived misdeeds.
“Not only does he come up, but there are people in the community that take action through magic, through spell work, to try to change the circumstances that we find ourselves in,” Kees said.
“Whether that is to try and protect the people who might be harmed by the actions of this administration, whether it is to try to limit the actions of the administration, to try to blunt their force perhaps.”
Yes, spells still do happen.
But Kees said modern-day spells are more akin to prayers and seeking self-help. No dark energy.
A casual observer could certainly surmise the members of Firefly House are “woke” witches. Worth noting, “witch” is now considered a non-gendered term. Men can be witches, too (Warlocks are so 19th century).
Firefly members will tell you that witches simply get a bad rap, charting through the centuries how practitioners of Pagan beliefs went from different, to wrong, to evil in the eyes of onlookers from the outside.
Yet the group also believes a glaring historical inaccuracy is intertwined with Mr. Trump’s invocation of the phrase “witch hunt.”
Firefly witches see the metaphor as entirely misplaced. Victims of witch hunts were typically among the most vulnerable members of society – not its most powerful.
“It strikes me as ludicrous that this individual with so much power is using the term to refer to himself,” Kees said.
“He is more than capable of defending himself, he is more than capable of advocating for himself in ways that people who were the victims of witch hunts historically were not able to do.”