Tree-Men of M’bwa
The Tree-Men of M’bwa are from Donald Wandrei's short story, "The Tree-Men of M'bwa", first published in Weird Tales, February 1932.
Tree-Men Creatures
The tree farthest left stood like a clumsy giant a hundred feet high, the one on the right looked more like an ordinary man. Between them were the other trees in rising scale. No branches or leaves like trees I knew—just one limb hanging down on each side and a round lump in the middle where a head would be... for the smallest tree was looking back at me with the eyes of a living man! The arms hung limply down. The other trees grew bigger toward the end one which hardly seemed human at all except for its huge limbs and gnarled five branches like fingers that trailed down from the end of each limb....
But there he was all of a sudden, not fifty yards away, a horribly wrinkled old black, with a face as pasty as the gray ground, and a blank look in his eyes. What's more, he was coming straight at me, no mistake about it... in complete sheer terror, I let him have it, both barrels full in the chest. I saw the bullets crash clear through him, but he didn't even falter, and not a drop of blood came from the livid flesh around the hole. Then I turned to run and he was on me like the wind. He was cold, his eyes were dead like a corpse's, and I knew I was up against something beyond the most frightful dream. Never a sound did he make, never a light of life or intelligence shone in his dead eyes; he moved like living death, soulless, stiff, and his flesh was like ice but his strength was terrific.
— Donald Wandrei's "The Tree-Men of M'bwa"
These "Tree-Men" appear to be Zombie-like humanoid beings with animated, wooden bodies, who pursue victims to plant like trees in the sacred groves of the Tree-Men. The victims are forced to drink a strange liquid - a serum or sap produced by elder Tree-Men - while partially buried in the strange soil of the groves, and victims thus planted sprout roots anchoring them firmly into the sacred grove, where these victims are left to slowly transform into first into sessile, woody, tree-like, sentient vegetables.
The Tree-Men themselves seem to serve an alien entity they know of as "The Master'.
Tree-Man Serum
A liquid or sap produced by the Tree-Men, used for preparing their victims for the transformation into more Tree-Men; the serum causes a victim to become immobile when planted into the strange soil of a Tree-Man's grove, where the victim sprouts tendrils that root him into the earth, beginning the slow, maddening transformation of the victim into a Tree-Man.
In the early stages of this transformation, the victims of the Tree-Men still retain human features, such as human-like eyes, fevered with the madness resulting from the ghastly transformation, peering from human-shaped tree trunks. As the transformation advances, the Tree-Men become more and more tree-like. The transformation a slow, maddening process that takes over a century to complete, with the final stage being a towering, fully-transformed tree-man with no remaining vestige of humanity.
It may be possible to carry off victims in the very earliest stages of the transformation from the soil of the sacred grove, allowing them in the absence of the grove's unnatural influence to revert, more or less, to a human form, though the longer the transformation is allowed to progress before rescuing the victim, the less physically human they are able to become after rescue, and the more their sanity is likely to have deteriorated into a mixture of insanity from the horrific experience, and the slow transformation of the victim's human intellect into that of a Tree-Man.
Cult of the Tree-Men of M'bwa
The Tree-Men cults appear to be closely-tied to the specific locations in and around their sacred groves, with cultists instinctively feeding and tending the human "trees" they plant.
The first Tree-Man cult documented in the modern era was discovered in a remote African valley in the 1920s - the forbidden Valley of the Mountains of the Moon, but there can be little doubt that there are other such cults in strange, dark corners of the earth to this day, and investigators have inferred from the evidence of mythology that groves of Tree-Men might have been encountered and eventually exterminated by Greeks and Romans in classical Europe, Druids exploring the British Isles in antiquity, Spanish explorers in the Amazon, and by Native American tribesmen settling the post-apocalyptic forests of pre-Columbian North America.
Thus, it seems that the Tree-Men have found some unknown way migrating far from their original groves to found new one across oceans on distant continents.
It is possible that the Tree Men and their sacred groves are worshiped and served by Human Cultists, who, working in league with the Tree Men without being themselves planted in the groves, are able to mingle among unsuspecting human populations, and carry the seeds of the Tree-Man cult - perhaps a flask of the Tree-Man serum - to new locations to found new groves to worship, thus spreading the cult to strange new places, choosing victims to force or trick into drinking the serum, or voluntarily drinking the serum themselves to become "blessed" as the first Tree-Man in a new Sacred Grove.
The Master, the Shining Pyramid, and the Angley & Richard Expedition
The 1920s-era Angley & Richard expedition to the forbidden Mountains of the Moon in Africa encountered the first grove of Tree-Men recorded in modern times. Many aspects of this encounter with the Tree Men are distinctly strange even compared to the other strange accounts describing contact with the Tree-Men:
As the expedition approached the mountains, they encountered a ring of weird, vaguely human-shaped trees encircling a shining pyramid.
Among the trees, the men encountered a fibrous plant-man leader, M'Bwa, who claimed to be the eldest of the Tree Men, a priest who served some monstrous floating alien entity he called "The Master", which dwells in the pyramid.
M'Bwa, as in the case of other Tree-Man encounters, fed those of the expedition who unknowingly accepted it some Tree Man serum, and then attacked the expedition, planting those members who had tasted the serum in the Sacred Grove of M'Bwa. The other members of the expedition were able to escape, and fight back, killing M'Bwa and rescuing some of their planted comrades early in their transformations into Tree-Men.
However, the rescue attempts were interrupted by M'Bwa, who had somehow been revived by the power of The Master, and could not die forever, M'Bwa springing back to life shortly afterward each time was slain.
Given its alien nature, its strange power, and the deference with M'Bwa served it, "The Master" is almost certainly some unknown Great Old One, served by M'Bwa's Tree-Man cult....
The Fountain of Youth and the Amazonian Expedition
The strange case of the Spanish encounter with a Sacred Grove planted in the Amazon may reveal some suggestive things about the nature of a Tree-Man cult: the explorers were supposed to have been seeking the "Fountain of Youth", and the leaders of the expedition claimed they had found the fountain themselves on a previous expedition, in the form of a pool in the heart of a strange grove deep in the rain forest, recruiting a new expedition to follow them back into the forest to claim the Fountain for themselves.
According to the accounts of the newly-recruited members of the second expedition, there was no true fountain, and the leaders of the expedition had tricked their followers: the only "eternal youth" to be found in the monstrous Tree-Man grove in the forest was transformation into eternally-youthful trees, which their expedition's leaders proceeded to do to their unsuspecting followers, as soon as the trap had been sprung on the men who had accompanied the second expedition, unaware of what was planned for them.
Several of the soldiers were successfully planted in the grove, to become Tree-Men, but a few others had managed to escape from their captors, who were then slain, and their terrible grove destroyed, with the location of the useless, ordinary "fountain of youth" subsequently lost to the ages after the last surviving victims returned to the closest outpost of civilization after a series of terrible misadventures among the natives along the way. Some of the clues in this account suggest to investigators that the dishonourable leaders of the expedition were themselves victims of the Tree-Men during their previous expedition, who were planted in the grove just long enough to lose their human sanity, only to then be uprooted, reverted back to human form, and sent out to lure new victims to the Amazonian grove and its false fountain pool....
Short Story Synopsis
The Tree-Men of M’bwa are from Donald Wandrei's short story, "The Tree-Men of M'bwa", first published in Weird Tales, February 1932. Story Synopsis (contains spoilers):
Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)
"The Tree Men of M'Bwa" is the tale of the fate of the Angley & Richard expedition to the forbidden Mountains of the Moon in Africa. As the expedition approaches the mountains, they encounter a ring of weird, vaguely human-shaped trees encircling a shining pyramid. M'Bwa, a fibrous plant-man serving a monstrous floating alien entity known as "The Master" which dwells in the pyramid, chases Richards down and pours a strange liquid down his throat, and plants him in the ring of trees. Angley manages to rescue Richards, beheading M'Bwa, who is quickly revived by The Master. The two men escape, but Angley dies later; Richards, now ancient and legless, finds his way back to civilization....
Heresies and Controversies
- Details of the world-spanning Tree-Man Sacred Grove cults, the Spanish Amazonian expedition to seek the Fountain of Youth among the Tree-Men, and some other details described above were suggested by members of YSDC, based on ideas drawn from Donald Wandrei's short story..
Keeper Notes
Associated Mythos Elements
- location: Mountains of the Moon, Africa
- location: "Sacred Groves" where the Tree-Men are planted
- location/artifact: Shining Pyramid of The Master, containing The Master, which stands in the center of a great ring of Tree-Men in a valley before the Mountains of the Moon
- deity: "The Master", an unknown, monstrous, alien Great Old One which dwells within the Shining Pyramid, and is served by M'Bwa's Tree-Man cult
- character: M'Bwa, first and eldest of Tree-Man, and the leader of their cult in Africa
- artifact: Tree-Man Serum
- race: Human Cultists might collaborate with some Tree-Man cults/groves
- races - some similar sorts of plant-monsters might include:
References
- fiction: Donald Wandrei's "The Tree-Men of M'bwa"
- sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum
