IVOIRE is an evolving artistic and philosophical praxis—a living Gesamtkunstwerk, in Trahndorff’s sense of an internally unified, multimodal work of art—in which poetry, embodied ritual, mythopoesis, and collaborative performance form the core Syntax of Enchantment for a disenchanted age. Rooted in a lineage of critical reflection on reason, ritual efficacy, and the autonomy of art, IVOIRE arises as both response and alternative to the disjunctions of modernity, rejecting the passivity of nostalgia and the stasis of mere longing; this is not a project of reminiscence but of living enchantment. IVOIRE likewise refuses to cede the project of re-enchantment to superstition or naïve belief, insisting instead on an active, reflexive creation of meaning through art, ritual, and mythic praxis.

The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, while unleashing epochal powers of intellectual and technological progress, also led the Western mind to reason itself out of the magic circle. In the pursuit of certainty, mastery, and objective explanation, the natural world was methodically stripped of its immanent mystery, meaning, and participatory sacredness. Rationality emerged out of nature—often repressing or controlling it—and the very modes of inquiry that once amplified wonder by unveiling unexpected orders, scales, and forces in nature were increasingly organized around control, prediction, and utility, so that they came to function as engines of disenchantment. The magic circle of ritual and myth—lived spaces of encounter with the numinous—gave way to abstraction, instrumentality, and estrangement.

IVOIRE’s praxis begins precisely where this historical rupture leaves us: rather than yearning for a return to premodern innocence, it proposes that intellect can deliberately reason its way back in. In this re-enchanted praxis, the magic circle is not a pre-given symbolic order to be passively entered—whether inherited tradition, institutional ritual, or any extant system of meaning—but one consciously redrawn, cast through poetry, embodied ritual, collaborative art, and mythic syntax as a language in which magic and reason may speak in concert. It is a self-reflexive system, fully aware of its own artifice and yet convinced of its efficacy. Here the faculties of critical thought, aesthetic creation, and symbolic language, long harnessed to critique, demystify, and instrumentalize the world, become catalysts for ever-renewed enchantment; intellect returns to its origins, not to regress, but to integrate, transform, and create new forms of living meaning that may, through repetition and communal performance, sediment into a lived tradition, not mere inheritance.

IVOIRE offers no fixed ends, no metaphysical absolutes, no supernatural paraphernalia. Instead, it situates agency—the need and right to create meaning—at its core, proposing a grammar of ritual and thought for those who seek the sublime yet refuse to close their eyes. In place of unexamined inheritance, it offers a sophisticated practice: a way of staging, writing, and performing enchantment that acknowledges its own constructedness even as it proves experientially real.