Let the lost become sacred again
BorboroForge means "filth-forge," a name inspired by Hekate's ancient epithet Borborophorba, "eater of filth." It honors her power to transmute waste into sacredness. My work follows that path: reclaiming scrap metal and forging it into ritual tools, jewelry, and art. The site has grown around that same instinct: take the discarded, overlooked, half-remembered, or badly organized thing and give it a useful shape again.
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BorboroForge is part workshop, part notebook, and part weird little reference shelf. The forge work is still the center of gravity: hand-forged ritual tools, jewelry, blades, and sculptural objects made from reclaimed bronze, copper, and steel. Around it are the things that feed the practice: plant research, historical magic, practical calculators, and field guides built because I wanted better tools than the ones I kept finding.
What You'll Find Here
The metalwork lives in the Gallery and Custom Metalwork pages: finished pieces, commission notes, and the practical details that matter when an object is meant to be handled instead of merely looked at.
The apothecary side is where curiosity has to keep its boots on. Portland Wild Apothecary is a local plant guide for useful, weedy, edible, dye, fiber, and culturally interesting plants around Portland, with identification notes and a growing plant ID glossary. Herbal First Aid Kit is more cautious and symptom-focused: what people actually keep around the house, what the limits are, and when the correct answer is not an herb.
The arcana tools are built in the same spirit: less mystical fog machine, more usable map. There are pages for Hekate's epithets, magical correspondences, planetary magic squares, PGM pronunciation, Grammatomanteia, planetary hours, and Tarot Compressed.
The alchemy and forge-reference pages are the plain shop-floor end of the same habit: alloy recipes that record how metals behave in practice, and melting temperature tables for when memory is worse than a decent reference.
Beyond the Forge
The through-line is transformation, but not in the polished slogan sense. Scrap becomes a blade. A plant you walk past every day becomes identifiable. A table from an old grimoire becomes something you can test, sort, click, or pronounce out loud without pretending certainty where there isn't any.
Some projects are cautionary by design. The PNW Baneful Herbs and Pharmakeia pages deal with plants and fungi where knowledge carries real weight. I am interested in the old stories and uses, but I am not interested in sanding off the danger to make the material feel friendlier.
Other projects are small acts of repair: compressing tarot meanings until the useful part is visible, making planetary timing calculable, mapping correspondences as a web instead of a dead list, or writing plant notes that are short enough to use outside with muddy shoes and a phone at 9% battery.
It is all one practice from different angles: make the thing, name the thing, test the thing, and leave better notes for the next person who comes along.