#cruciamentum

[drondskaath]

Cruciamentum | Obsidian Refractions | 24th November, 2023

International Death Metal

Artwork by David Glomba

[metal-patches-vinyl]

New patch day: Cruciamentum and Gatecreeper.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

ℭ𝔯𝔲𝔠𝔦𝔞𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪 - 𝔑𝔢𝔠𝔯𝔬𝔭𝔥𝔞𝔤𝔬𝔲𝔰 ℭ𝔬𝔪𝔪𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔬𝔫

[triste-guillotine]

CRUCIAMENTUM "Obsidian Refractions" LP 2023

1. Charnel Passages 2. Abhorrence Evangelium 3. Necropolis of Obsidian Mirrors 4. Scorn Manifestation 5. Interminable Rebirth in Abomination 6. Drowned

"Quietly the tides consumed Taking hold, their cold embrace Enveloped and overwhelmed Drifting, interred within the food

Dragged by the tide to the deepest abyss Where shadows dance in the lightless gulf

With each breath, a deluge, An inexorable force Lungs overwhelmed and immersed Stifled, fading beyond

Adrift, carried by the tide Veins filled with sediment

The body erodes like leaves in the wind At the pull of the undercurrent

To the end, dark waters carry me forth Spread across the abyssal plains"

CRUCIAMENTUM on "Obsidian Refractions" are : C.E. – Lead Vocals / Bass D.L. – Guitars/ Keyboards / Backing Vocals D.R. – Guitars M.H. – Drums

Artwork by David Glomba. Mixing and Re-Amping by Greg Chandler at Priory Recording Studio. Mastered by D. Lowndes at Resonance Sound Studios.

Obsidian Refractions | CRUCIAMENTUM | Cruciamentum (bandcamp.com)

[radiophd]

cruciamentum -- abhorrence evangelium

[weepingchoir]

I promise you the bands are coming up with their own words

they need to come up with more words like necrosis and miasma and mausoleum and cadaver and morose and decrepit and stuff like that just so metal bands can expand their vocabulary

[lesdeuxmuses]

Cruciamentum - Charnel Passages (Me Saco Un Ojo Records, Profound Lore Records, 2019)

[proofhead]

Chaos Magazine 11. ve 12. Sayılar

Aylar önce Chaos Magazine’in geri dönüş sayısının haberini yaptıktan sonra, yıl bitmeden bir yeni sayı ve devamında da yepyeni bir 12. sayı daha yayımladı Lainmeun – Murat Chaos Gökbulut. Derginin 10. sayısıyla birlikte başlayan renkli ve ciltli bookazin formatı öylesine sevildi ki geriye dönüp yıllar önce siyah beyaz çıkan 9. sayıyı bile “yalandan renkli” bastı. Dolayısıyla bu yepyeni renkli ve…

[coraniaid]

Headcanon that I've been playing around with for a few days: what if the reason the Tento di Cruciamentum -- the test Buffy is forced to undergo in Season 3's Helpless -- is so hard to square with a lot of the show's established lore is that, in a very real sense, it doesn't exist? What if it isn't the rite of passage that every Slayer goes through that Giles tells Buffy it is?

Let me explain: I think there are two main issues with the Cruciamentum as presented to us. One issue is that it doesn't really make sense as worldbuilding (but then, what part of Buffy's world-building would survive any serious scrutiny?). The other -- more serious -- issue is that, depending on when Giles is meant to have found out about it, it retroactively does very odd things to his character.

As an attempt at worldbuilding, then: the Cruciamentum doesn't make sense on the grounds the Council's leader Quentin Travers gives to justify it. Quite simply: what on earth are they testing for and why? The whole point of the Slayer is that she has superhuman strength and reflexes! Testing how well she'd do without those atribbutes is pointless: if she didn't have those things she wouldn't be the Slayer!

If the Slayer is meant to find out about the test and her own Watcher's role in subjecting her to it after the fact then it damages her relationship with the Council for no obvious benefit. If she isn't ever meant to find out, then … okay, if she survives you now know she (might) be able to survive a similar situation if it happens in the future, only it won't because you won't do it again. (And maybe she won't survive a second time anyway; but she'll certainly spend a lot of time needlessly worrying about the possibility.) If she doesn't survive, you now need to find and train a new Slayer from scratch. And if this was the point all along, there are much easier ways for the Council (who explicitly have "wetworks" teams and the resources to hire professional assassins) to get rid of a troublesome Slayer. I mean, why don't they just shoot her? Or if they're poisoning her anyway (which they're doing to rob her of her powers), why not inject her with something fatal?

And, although I realize this isn't true outside of the canon of the TV show, it's noteworthy that the Cruciamentum is almost never brought up again after Helpless. Indeed, it's very hard to square the existence of the Cruciamentum with any of the show post-Helpless. Whether with Faith (who's supposed need to go through her own Cruciamentum is consistently ignored) or with the Season 7 Potentials (if "every Slayer", as Giles tells us, undergoes the Cruciamentum on her eighteenth birthday, it must logically be the case that no Slayer is ever called after her eighteenth birthday. So how old is Kennedy?) or with Buffy being allowed free access to the Watcher's Diaries (surely she'd notice, at some point, that a lot of Slayers happened to all die on the same birthday? wouldn't she think that was strange?).

For Giles the key question seems to me to be when exactly he knew about the Cruciamentum. If he always knew, even before he ever met Buffy, I kind of think that retroactively poisons her relationship with him in much the same way that the Normal Again retcon poisons Buffy's relationship with her mother. Keeping something like that secret for months or even years is quite straightforwardly monstrous. His various speeches to her in Prophecy Girl or Lie To Me or Innocence about being on her side and offering her nothing but respect read very very differently if you assume that all this time he knew what he'd be putting her through if and when she made it to eighteen. His efforts helping her study for the SATs -- and admonishing her seriously that this is a "rite of pssage" -- takes on a pretty sinister second reading. And so on, and so forth. It just doesn't really work. I can't convince myself the Giles of the first two seasons of the show -- or even the Giles of Dead Man's Party -- knew anything about this.

No, I think the only way of saving Giles as a character, and the only way of making sense of how quickly Buffy forgives him, is to assume that the Cruciamentum is something that Travers surprised Giles with. Something he didn't know about until, at most, a couple of weeks before the test itself. Something that he was told he had to go along with if he didn't want to be replaced, something that every Slayer before Buffy had been through, something that she'd survive as long as he'd trained her well and she was a better than average Slayer (which, being Giles, of course he'd assume she was). I think this explains why he's still so angry about it, and yet why he doesn't simply refuse outright: he's deliberately not been given enough time to think things through.

(Even so, the decision he does make is pretty terrible; I don't think there's any arguing about that. I still wouldn't blame Buffy if she never forgave him; and I don't think he'd have any grounds to complain either.)

Furthermore though, the way the Council deal with Giles after Helpless -- officially firing him, but not doing anything to stop him from continuing to act as Buffy's de facto Watcher, sending a very junior and unpolished replacement who lets himself be bossed around by his predecessor -- doesn't really make sense either. Travers makes a show of firing him in front of Buffy and suggests he have "no further contact" with her, and Travers threatens that he'll be "dealt with" if he interferes with the new Watcher or countermands his authority "in any way". Only, uh. Giles does all that, and suffers exactly no repercussions.

In Season 5's Checkpoint Giles will claim that the Council are "the best in the world" when it comes to bureaucracy and pulling political strings, and in that same episode Travers threatens to have him deported. So if the Council wanted to make sure he wouldn't have further contact with Buffy, why not just … do that? If they don't want Giles to be in Sunnydale -- or anywhere even close to California -- we're told they have the means to arrange that. And yet they very obviously don't.

Putting these strands together -- it's very hard to make sense of the Cruciamentum as a mandatory test for all Slayers; it seems plausible that Giles only found out about it from Travers at very short notice; the Council had the ability to make Giles "firing" more permanent and never took it -- I think it's credible to suggest that … well, that the Cruciamentum doesn't exist.

Whatever evidence Travers used to convince Giles of it was somehow fabricated or faked. Maybe there was some sort of test like it, centuries ago, and Travers could just pretend it was still being practiced. Maybe there never was. Maybe it's like one of those supposed medieval torture methods that the Victorians used to love to make up. Maybe Travers just decided that, with the properly trained Kendra gone and a new Watcher heading to Sunnydale anyway (we know that Giles has told the Council about Faith, remember), it wouldn't hurt to try something that would either rid him of a particularly irritating Slayer and leave (what he assumed would be) a more malleable replacement who didn't need to be found, or, failing that, would at least damage Buffy's relationship with her Watcher. Maybe he's happy for Giles to carry on providing free instruction and training to the active Slayers; he just wants to make sure neither of them trust him too much. Maybe the events of the episode played out almost exactly the way Travers wanted. Maybe the Cruciamentum never existed until he made it up.

Or, okay, yes, maybe the Cruciamentum is just a much bigger deal in fanon than it ever was meant to be in canon and, like most of Buffy's often silly world-building, you're just not meant to think about it too hard. Both good options.

[metal-patches-vinyl]

Cruciamentum – Obsidian Refractions (2023). I discovered this way late in the year, so I’ve only been able to spin it a couple of times. But this is really good. Reminds me of early Decapitated in a lot of ways. Production is so good! Highly recommended.

[oveliagirlhaditright]

You know what's sad? Even if Kendra hadn't been killed by Drusilla and had survived season two, there's a good chance she wouldn't have survived her Cruciamentum when it eventually came up--since a Slayer, without her strength there, needs to be clever and to be able to think outside the box, in order to do so: everything Kendra had been raised and taught not to do, while living within the Council's strict guidelines the Council had imposed onto her life from her birth.

Maybe there's a chance she could have survived, if she had gotten to spend more time with Buffy--as we did see that Buffy was already starting to have small influences on her--but I don't know.

[jannacalendar]

If Jenny had survived the events of Passion I am confident she would have gotten Giles into Even More Trouble with the Council by immediately leaving the library in the wake of Buffy's test to go and warn Faith about the Cruciamentum.

[evermore-grimoire]

The Evermore Grimoire: Slayers

Nikki Wood was a Slayer based in New York City during the 1970s and was trained by a Watcher named Crowley. She was notable for being one of the few Slayers known to have been a mother. In 1973, Nikki participated in her Tento di Cruciamentum, much to the disapproval of Crowley, who was appalled that the Watchers Council forced her to undergo it as she was pregnant at the time. Upon surviving her Cruciamentum, she gave birth to her son named Robin. She didn't know exactly who his father was as she "didn't take names when blowing off steam." Crowley arranged for Nikki to go into hiding and live a normal life with Robin. Nikki took Robin and lived in South America as well as Mexico for a while. However, she couldn't dismiss her calling, and returned to New York and her duty as the Slayer. Sometime in 1977, the vampire Spike tracked Nikki down, wanting to challenge and kill his second Slayer. They met and fought in Central Park for the first time with Nikki's young son Robin watching from behind a park bench. The fight came to a stand still and Spike fled the scene. Before he left, he complimented her coat. In the same year, Nikki and Spike had their final showdown inside a New York City subway train. Nikki was able to pin Spike to the floor and repeatedly punch him, but, as the train went through a dark tunnel, Spike took advantage and switched positions. Nikki begged to be able to return home to her son, but he strangled her, before breaking her neck and stealing her coat which he wore until its destruction 26 years later.

artwork by bofenglin

[herinsectreflection]

But You're Just A Girl (Helpless)

The test that Buffy undergoes in this episode – in which she is stripped of her powers, locked inside a house, and forced to fight a mentally unstable vampire – is named in the script as The Cruciamentum. Giles describes it as “an archaic exercise in cruelty”, and it’s difficult to think of a description that could be more accurate.

The word Cruciamentum is an invented declension that roughly translates from Latin as “result of torture”. Quentin Travers – making his first appearance here as the Head of the Watcher’s Council – defends the practice as a necessary rite of passage, meant to make a Slayer stronger, but this reasoning falls apart under scrutiny The scenario is so heavily weighted against the Slayer, robbing her not only of her powers but the knowledge that she is being robbed at all, that it makes more sense to view the Cruciamentum not as a test, but as a method of control, designed to kill off Slayers that reach adulthood and so gain more independence from the Council. At the very least, it demonstrates the Council’s control over the Slayer, holding the implicit threat of taking away her powers again over her head for the rest of her life. As is the case with many unjust systems, the cruelty is the point.

The Cruciamentum is the Council’s most clear and obvious cruelty, but it is not by any means their only one. Cruelty is their origin story, as we see in Get It Done how they forcibly created the first Slayer through metaphorical rape. It is baked into the central idea of One Girl In All The World – a system which relies on the deaths of an infinite chain of young women. Its current setup, with one Watcher in the field and apparently dozens sitting safely away in England, leads to an inevitable cruelty of indifference that Giles calls out in this episode. There are cruelties of incompetence – failing to alert the field about the firing of Gwendolyn Post, sending the underqualified Wesley to Sunnydale. But perhaps their most impactful cruelty is also their most subtle. It came the moment that Buffy Summers, sitting outside her school in 1997, was called to be a Slayer. This act not only changed Buffy’s life, but caused an irreparable crack in her psyche. It splits her perceived self into two component parts – The Girl and The Slayer – twin selves that she spends seven seasons trying to reconcile.

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