In our first book, Amy wrote about stumbling onto the term GoddETC as coined by artist and Witch, Maria Molteni. This terminology has since become core for how we think about Witchcraft: we see our practice as politics, art, and spirituality reaching beyond gender binaries to a power in the Earth and in each other that is multiple, fertile, delightful, divergent, and fucking delicious.
People find different entry points to the GoddETC, and those are unique to them and their nature and nurture and heritage. They might be moved by archetypes like Freya or Hekate, or experience a homecoming by honouring queer ancestors, or develop a satisfying, mind-bending relationship with a cedar grove. This kind of magic-craft, Spirit-craft, Witch-craft is all related and glorious in the infinite eyes of the GODDETC because it strengthens our kinship and helps heal what centuries of capitalism and colonialism have broken in us.
Over and over again in our coven we see folks connect with the great big openness of this idea of divinity and it is electric, so here's the excerpt from Missing Witches: Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic with all our love and adoration to that Beewitch, Badbitch, and Baller, Maria Molteni.
Witches know that words are spells, capable of creating or changing reality... In discussions around contemporary spirituality, I have seen the words God and Goddess replaced with GoddETC, coined, I believe, by artist and self-described “queerdo” Maria Molteni, and I think that’s a perfect description. What we, as humans, can imagine of that which is beyond. Etc. And so on. Plus more.
Witches know that words are spells.
I reached out to Maria to ask her about this neologism. Up to this point I had often seen the more standard use of the letter X to replace a gendered suffix. Think Latinx or Filipinx instead of Latino or Filipina. Maria told me that the X is a No, a healthy and powerful No to Gender Essentialism, but the ETC in GoddETC is a Yes to Everything, healthy and powerful in a different way. For most of recorded colonial human history, the ETC of Gender is Missing. Women are missing. The Plus More is missing. Not just missing, but erased, squelched, deliberately left out of our stories of how culture was built. - Amy Torok, Missing Witches
We here in the Missing Witches Coven aim to keep our definitions and worldviews infinite and expansive, to add the divinity of ETC to all of our workings. Our ideas, plus more.
Keep an ear out for Maria Molteni on an upcoming episode of the Missing Witches Podcast.
