Madremonte

Region/Culture: Colombia (Antioquia, the central and western Andes, and the Magdalena and Cauca valleys)
Mythos: Colombian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Guardian nature spirit of the forests and mountains, with power over weather and vegetation
Mythical Attributes: She commands storms, floods, and the tangle of the jungle itself, punishing those who abuse the land, its animals, or its water.
Role in Mythos: She is the mother and warden of the wild country, a living warning against greed, cruelty, and trespass.
Relation to Humans: She protects the forest from hunters, loggers, cattle thieves, and unfaithful husbands, driving them mad in the undergrowth or striking them senseless with her burning stare. Country people teach their children to respect the woods and the rivers so that they never draw her wrath.

The first sign is usually the weather. A clear afternoon over the Antioquian hills curdles without warning, the light goes green and heavy, and thunder rolls up from the deep ravines where no storm should start. Somewhere below the tree line a sound cuts across the thunder, a long furious wail that is not the wind. Loggers who have heard it while felling a tree say they dropped their axes and ran, and did not stop to see what was screaming.

That scream belongs to the Madremonte, the Mother of the Mountain, and she has been keeping the wild country of Colombia since before the country had a name. Her territory runs from the forests of Antioquia through the central and western Andes and down into the swampy reaches of the Magdalena and the Cauca. Wherever the trees grow thick and the rivers run brown after rain, the old people will tell you whose house it is.

No two witnesses fully agree on her face. Farmers and cattle hands who claim to have glimpsed her describe a tall, elegant woman, broad-shouldered and regal, dressed head to foot in fresh green leaves and soft moss, her hair a mat of vines and creepers, her features half-hidden under a wide hat trimmed with leaves and feathers. Others swear she is monstrous, a putrid, moss-covered thing with long bony arms, heavy fangs, and a face twisted with rage, her eyes bulging and lit from within like coals. A few say she can be an old woman, gaunt and long-limbed, wrapped in rotting foliage. The disagreement is part of the legend. She is the forest, and the forest looks different depending on whether you have come to it with clean hands.

Her origins reach back past the colonial towns into the indigenous cosmovisions of the region, where the land itself was an ancestor and the mountains were presences to be reckoned with. She is one face of the old Mother Earth, kin to the Andean Pachamama and to the water and forest guardians of the wider continent. In Antioquia the storytellers tie her directly to Dabeiba, the goddess of the Catío, Nutabe, and Chocó peoples, whose power ran through the forests, rivers, and hurricanes of the Atrato. When Spanish farmers and their descendants pushed into the hills, they did not so much invent the Madremonte as inherit her, folding an older divinity into the shape of a spirit who guarded the frontier of the tamed and the untamed.

She does not guard gently. The Madremonte hunts the people who wrong the wild: hunters who kill for sport, fishermen who dynamite the rivers, woodcutters who take more than they need, campesinos who move a boundary stone to steal a neighbour’s land, and men who cheat on their wives. She calls to them with her cries, drawing them off the path and into the deep timber, then loses them there so completely that they wander for hours or days convinced the whole ordeal was a nightmare. Sometimes she does worse, stunning an offender with a look from those fiery eyes until he crumples in the leaf litter, or carrying a straying child away into the green. The muddied, overflowing rivers of the rainy season were her doing too, the country people said, the water fouled because she had bathed in the headwaters, and with the flood came sickness carried down on the current.

A common story has a proud hunter follow a deer deeper than he should, laughing at the tales, until the trees close behind him and every direction looks the same. He walks in circles until his boots rot off his feet, and when he finally stumbles back to the village he is white-haired and cannot say where he has been. Another tells of a man who came home to boast of the fine ganado he had rustled, only to hear, that night, a woman weeping and raging in the trees behind his house, and to find by morning that both cattle and man were gone.

Her strength is the strength of the wilderness, and so are her limits. She rules weather, water, and the tangle of growing things; she can raise a storm, swell a river, and turn a familiar trail into a trap. What she cannot do is reach a person who refuses to be afraid. The old defence against her is to face her squarely, show no terror, and beat at her with switches of tobacco, whose smoke and bite the country people held sacred against wild spirits. She is bound to her forests and her waters and has no power over the man who simply stays out of them, takes only what he needs, and leaves the boundary stones where they lie. Insult the mountain and she is a nightmare with fangs. Respect it and you may live your whole life at its edge and never once hear her scream.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Madremonte in Colombian folklore?

The Madremonte, or Mother of the Mountain, is a guardian nature spirit of Colombian mythology who protects the forests, mountains, and rivers. She is described as a powerful female figure clothed in leaves and moss, and she punishes people who harm the land, its animals, or its water.

What does the Madremonte do to people?

The Madremonte pursues hunters, loggers, fishermen, cattle thieves, and unfaithful husbands, luring them off the trail with her cries and losing them in the deep forest for hours or days. She can also strike offenders senseless with a glare from her burning eyes and was blamed for the muddy floods and waterborne illness of the rainy season.

What does the Madremonte look like?

Descriptions of the Madremonte vary widely. Some accounts portray her as a tall, elegant woman dressed in fresh green leaves, moss, and vines with a leaf-and-feather hat, while others describe a monstrous, moss-covered hag with long bony limbs, large fangs, and glowing ember-like eyes.

How can you protect yourself from the Madremonte?

According to the legend, the Madremonte can be driven off by facing her directly without showing fear and whipping at her with branches of tobacco, which country people considered protective against wild spirits. Because her power is tied to the forests and rivers, anyone who respects the land and takes only what they need has little to fear from her.

Where does the legend of the Madremonte come from?

The Madremonte descends from ancient indigenous South American earth deities that personified Mother Nature. In Antioquia she is linked to Dabeiba, a goddess of the Catío, Nutabe, and Chocó peoples whose power governed the forests, rivers, and storms of the Atrato region.