NOTE: For more butterfly stories, be sure to look at the newly published book from Story Lovers World: Bees, Beetles, Butterflies and Other Beguiling Bugs: Folklore, Songs and Stories from Around the World. This book is available as a FREE PDF download through April 30, 2008 only. It features 125 stories about different kinds of bugs! Hurry, or you'll miss out!
http://www.story-lovers.com/bugbookv.2.pdf
It takes a while to download, so be patient! Some people report up to five minutes, so get it started, then go make a cup of tea or something while you wait!
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BUTTERFLY STORIES & FOLKLORE
(excerpts from posts)
(If you want to retell any of the stories listed below, be sure to obtain permission from the copyright holder if the material is not in the public domain)

1) The Butterfly WebSite Article List.
http://butterflywebsite.com/Articles/ShowArticle.cfm?ID=28

2) Legend of the Papago.
http://butterflywebsite.com/Articles/ShowArticle.cfm?ID=322

3) The White Butterfly. From F. Hadland Davis, Myths and Legends of Japan (London: G. G. Harrap and Company, 1913), pp. 218-219.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/japanlove.html#butterfly

4) URL no longer valid.

5) URL no longer valid.

6) What's a bunch of butterflies called?
http://www.naba.org/sightings/Multitudesofbutterflies.htm

7) http://www.butterflyhouse.org/

8) A few stories that have not been mentioned before... I think this one is an Indian legend, but I don't know from where. It's about a man/woman who saw a butterfly struggling to get out of its chrysalis. He watched it struggle for a while and then stop. The man thought that it was so difficult for the butterfly to get out that he would make it a little easier. He cut the cocoon just a little, just enough that the butterfly wouldn't have to struggle so much. It worked and the butterfly crawled out easily. He had a big fat body and withered wings. The man stuck around to watch the wings spread, but they never did. Without the struggle of getting out of the chrysalis, the butterfly had not been able to pump enough the fluid from its body into its wings. The struggle was what made the butterfly so beautiful.
Comment: Annie Dillard tells this as a personal experience in her book Holy the Firm.
Added Comment: A comment on the comment on #8 on your informative webpage,
Dillard's sad story of a polyphemous moth isn't about the moth being hurried out of the cocoon. The reason it is deformed (and presumably dies very soon) is not that it emerges from its cocoon too soon, but that when it does, the cocoon is still inside a Mason jar and the moth doesn't have room to spread its wings. They dry crumpled and remain that way. She tells this story in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Amy Z.M. 10/10/06
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Another is is the Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology by Sun Bear. There is a well-respected healer in the village who loves crawlers, like caterpillars. When she dies and is buried, her husband puts a caterpillar in with her, as instructed in a dream. The first butterflies fly from her gravesite in spectacular color. I can't find my copy of the book right now, so that's the best I can do off the top of my head.

The story Children Learned to Walk is said to be Ojibway. It is in The World's Greatest Nature Myths: formerly Spirits of the Wild: The World's Great Nature Myths by Gary Ferguson, Falcon Publishing, Helena, MT. Animals used to take care of the children. They spoiled them so much that they never learned to walk. Everything was brought to them. They realized there was a problem and went to Nanabush for the answer. While thinking, Nanabush was tossing pebbles in the air. After a while they turned into butterflies. The children saw the butterflies, rose to their feet and started chasing them. That's how butterflies taught the children how to walk.

There is a book called Spring of the Butterflies and Other Folktales of China's Minority Peoples by He Liyi. The story Spring of the Butterflies is one that I have written down to learn because I liked it so much. Only now I don't remember what it is about because it was so long ago and my notes aren’t complete. The library call number on it is Y398.20951 S769.

9) I love The Butterfly Brothers (to which I add sisters) from Annette Harrison's Easy-To-Tell Stories for Young Children. Annette adds a song about playing and fluttering in the sun, which I don't know, but you could make up one. She also has different children be the flowers and the butterflies, choosing children wearing red, yellow, and white clothing to fit the story. I told it once at a school with uniforms, and used laminated pictures of butterflies and flowers in the 3 colors for them to hold. We ended up photocopying those for the children to color later.

10) Butterfly Ball
You need 12 perfect squares of paper. Square notepad paper works as well as expensive origami paper. I recommend three colors, 4units each. Fold one in half diagonally (making a triangle); open. Fold it on the other diagonal; open. Turn it over. Fold it in half crossways (making a rectangle). Open. You have a little tent-y thing with two large triangle sides, and two sides of 2 small triangles apiece. Make eleven more. They can be stored in a nested stack for compact, safe transportation. To assemble (this is the hard part to describe!!!): Take four units (for instance, 2 red and 2 blue) and interlace the large triangle sides under/over so that half of one triangle covers half of its neighbor's large triangle (tucked inside/under the covering half). The interlaced sides make a square diagonally divided into a r/b/r/b patchwork. The remaining portions of the units stick down making a sort of lumpy box. Turn it over so that it stands on its square patchwork side. With this square side in your palm, hold the units together with your fingers while, with your other hand: Add four units (vis 4 yellow), big triangles vertical, lacing one under/over between each r/b pair. Now you have a jagged-edged cup. Notice how the yellow units are starting to make new patchwork squares with their red or blue neighbors. Now comes the tricky part: closing the ball. Add a red or blue unit into each patchwork square. Watch out to keep the under/over order consistent; this is what holds the ball together, as well as making pleasing geometric patterns of color. The first one is easy. Just stick it in between two yellow points. The second one must be interleaved with that one, as well as with two yellows. Likewise the third one. Careful: the fourth=last one, the keystone, threatens to push the whole ball apart until you wiggle it into place. (This gets easier each subsequent time you do it.) Gently push all the units as close together as they can go, and check for consistent overlapping/ interlacing. Now you've got a handsome patchworked ball which will hold together through one or two gentle tosses in the air, but then will come apart into a fluttering shower of units.

11) There is a story entitled How Butterflies Got Their Name in Why the Possum's Tail Is Bare and Other Classic Southern Stories by Jimmy Neil Smith. It tells both how they came to be and how they were named.

12) I use my adapted version of James Howe's I Wish I Were a Butterfly. There is also a coyote story about the laughing butterflies.

13) A lovely old book published by Houghton Mifflin in 1919 (so it's definitely interlibrary loan, or better yet, out-of-print book search material) is The Wonder Garden by Frances Jenkins Olcott. The book is an anthology of garden-related stories complete with subject indexing & even a monthly list of programs from the stories. There are tales of many flowers, but also birds, insects, fruit, water, the sky, snow, trees & much more. Unfortunately I found many stories on Lilies, but no Lilies of the Valley; a story on a foolish young Tiger, but not the Tiger who became a Tiger Lily. However, there were 3 Butterfly stories & a poem by Keats. The butterfly story I liked the best was a paraphrase of Louisa May Alcott's "Prince Butterfly & Clover Blossom." To summarize it still further:One summer's morning a little Worm creeped into the meadow & asked the Flowers for shelter until the following spring. He promised that when he awoke he would come out in Fairy dress. None of the proud flowers agreed. Wild Rose showed her thorns & her face glowed with pride. Violet hid beneath some drooping Ferns; & the Daisy turned her face away. Others similarly refused until Clover Blossom offered a spot & sheltered him until the following spring. All the flowers again bloomed, but the Worm still lay quietly sleeping. The other Flowers tried to talk Clover into giving up on the Worm who must have been lying. Clover, however, remained faithful. At last a glittering Butterfly came out & soared to the sun on golden wings. The other Flowers then say the Butterfly will never return, but he does. All the Flowers preened in the hope of being chosen, but Prince Butterfly chose the faithful Clover & they lived happily together all that summer.

14) Butterfly--Church or motivational telling
The Cocoon
A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared, he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no farther. Then the man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon.

The butterfly then emerged easily.
But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If God allowed us to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been.

And we could never fly.

15) Laura C. Martin's Wildlife Folklore.
Benjamin Franklin said, "What is a butterfly? At best, he's but a caterpillar dressed." Caterpillars were belived to be created from Devil's tears.

16) How butterflies came to be, a Papago Indian story
Soon after the Earth-Maker created the earth, Iitoi, Elder Brother, was walking in the sunshine and heard children's voices as they played happily. He put the colors from flowers and fallen leaves, yellow pollen, white cornmeal, green pine needles, and a bit of golden sunshine into his magic bag. Then he called the children together and told them to open the bag. When they did, the first butterflies flew out and the children's hearts were glad.

Folklore from Europe and Japan and some tribes in NA believe that the butterfly is the soul of man. The Maori believe that a person's soul returns to earth after death in the form of a butterfly. The Finno-Gric people believe the soul leaves the body as a butterfly while a person is dreaming. To the Greeks, the soul was a tiny person with butterfly wings. In southern Germany it was believed that the dead are reborn as children who fly about as butterflies. Many medieval angels are portrayed with butterfly wings rather than birds.

In the Solomon Islands, the belief was that the dead can choose the form in which they will return to earth; many chose to return as butterflies. When a butterfly dies it is thought to be the end of the soul forever.

In Burma, rice is said to have a butterfly soul. A trail of husks and unthreshed rice is laid from the field to the granary so the soul may find the grain or none will grow the next year.

In many cultures, the butterfly is worshipped as god and creator. One Sumatran tribe say they are descended from 3 brothers hatched from eggs laid by a butterfly. A NA myth says the creator, Chiowotmahki, took the form of a butterfly and flew over the world until he found a suitable place for man to live.

In Mexico the butterfly is a symbol of the fertility of the earth. Samoans believe if they caught a butterfly, it would strike them dead.

But in many parts of Europe, butterflies are considered taboo and in Scotland, Friesland, and Bosnia they are witches. Serbians see the butterfly as the soul of a witch and believe that they turn the sleeping witch's body around, the butterfly-soul will not be able to find her mouth and reenter and the witch will die. In Bulgaria dark butterflies tell that sickness is coming, and in Brunswick if the first butterfly of the season is white, it is an omen of death. It it is yellow, birth and if variegated, a marriage will happen. Butterflies were also thought to be disguised fairies who steal butter and milk it's considered unlucky to capture them.

Butterflies were also weather predictors. If the first one seen in spring was white, then a rainy summer. If dark, then full of thunderstorms. If yellow, sunny weather.

17) The Butterfly Who Stamped is one of Kipling's A Collection of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. There's a pretty good moth-to-the-candle fable in Thurber's modern fable collection.

18) The Secret of Happiness
There is a wonderful fable about a young orphan girl who had no family and no one to love her. One day, feeling exceptionally sad and lonely, she was walking through a meadow when she noticed a small butterfly caught unmercifully in a thornbush. The more the butterfly struggled to free itself, the deeper the thorns cut into its fragile body. The young orphan girl carefully released the butterfly from its captivity. Instead of flying away, the little butterfly changed into a beautiful fairy. The young girl rubbed her eyes in disbelief. "For your wonderful kindness," the good fairy said to the girl, "I will grant you any wish you would like." The little girl thought for a moment and then replied, "I want to be happy!" The fairy said, "Very well," and leaned toward her and whispered in her ear. Then the good fairy vanished. As the little girl grew up, there was no one in the land as happy as she. Everyone asked her the secret of her happiness. She would only smile and answer, "The secret of my happiness is that I listened to a good fairy when I was a little girl." When she was very old and on her deathbed, the neighbors all rallied around her, afraid that the fabulous secret of happiness would die with her. "Tell us, please," they begged. "Tell us what the good fairy said." The lovely old woman simply smiled and said, "She told me that everyone, no matter how secure they seemed, no matter how old or young, how rich or poor, had need of me."

19) The Speaker's Sourcebook from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul (Chicken Soup for the Soul). Copyright 1997 by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Kimberly Kirberger.

20) Joe Hayes has a funny story you might use. The Butterflies Trick Coyote by Joe Hayes in his book A Heart Full of Turquoise: Pueblo Indian Tales.
ISBN 0933553056
Here is the condensed version, more or less..... "hundreds and hundreds of butterflies lived in the valley of the Salt lake. ....people came to the lake from miles and miles to gather salt for cooking; coyotes wife wanted to cook good food, but there wasnt any salt in the house" Coyote layed down by the lake to rest after his long run to get salt, the butterflies saw him - lazy ole coyote! they decided to play a trick on him and landed on Coyote, each butterfly took hold of one of coyotes hairs and flew up into the air, carrying coyote with them. they flew him back to his home - coyotes wife was very upset - Lazy coyote! Coyote went back to the lake and the same thing happened, only the butterflies left him on his roof and his wife was made - lazy ole coyote! The next day he arrived at Salt lake, he once again took a nap - lazy ole coyote. The butterflies tricked him again; only this time they took his salt of sack with coyote and flew him back to the house. Coyote was no confused about how he got home; his wife cooked good food, they danced and ate enjoying themselves. And in the valley of the Salt lake, the butterflies are still laughing so hard about the good trick that they played on coyote that they can never go in a straight line. All day long they swoop and zigzag and dart this way and that as they fly and laugh at lazy ole coyote!

21) And then there's Jay O'Callahan's Herman and Marguerite: An Earth Story, about a worm and a caterpillar/ butterfly and the music of the forest. It's a picture book.

22) BUTTERFLIES by Roger Dean Kiser
Story:
There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me. I guess that would have been when I was about six or seven years old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage turned me into an old man.

I would get up every morning at the orphanage, make my bed just like the little soldier that I had become and then I would get into one of the two straight lines and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in my dormitory.

After breakfast one Saturday morning I returned to the dormitory and saw the house parent chasing the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds in the azalea bushes strewn around the orphanage. I carefully watched as he would catch these beautiful creatures, one after the other, and then took them from the net and then stuck straight pins through their head and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet. How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty.

I had walked many times out into the bushes, all by myself, just so the butterflies could land on my head, face and hands so I could look at them up close. When the telephone rang the house parent laid the large cardboard paper down on the back cement step and went inside to answer the phone. I walked up to the cardboard and looked at the one butterfly who he had just pinned to the large paper. It was still moving about so I reached down and touched it on the wing causing one of the pins to fall out. It started flying around and around trying to get away but it was still pinned by the one wing with the other straight pin.

Finally its little wing broke off and the butterfly fell to the ground and just quivered. I picked up the torn wing and the butterfly and I spat on its wing and tried to get it to stick back on so it could fly away and be free before the house parent came back. But it would not stay on him.

The next thing I knew the house parent came walking back out of the back door by the garbage room and started yelling at me. I told him that I did not do anything but he did not believe me. He picked up the cardboard paper and started beating me on the top of the head. There were all kinds of butterfly pieces going everywhere. He threw the cardboard down on the ground and told me to pick it up and put it in the garbage can inside the back room of the dormitory and then he left.

I sat there in the dirt, by that big old tree, for the longest time trying to fit all the butterfly pieces back together so I could bury them whole, but it was too hard to do. So I prayed for them and then I put them in an old torn up shoe box and I buried them in the bottom of the fort that I had built in the ground, out by the large bamboos, near the blackberry bushes.

Every year when the butterflies would return to the orphanage and try to land on me, I would always try and shoo them away, because they did not know that the orphanage was a bad place to live and a very bad place to die.
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Stories from Orphan: A True Story of Abandonment, Abuse, and Redemption by Roger Dean Kiser.
http://www.rogerdeankiser.com
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23) Butterfly folklore books.
• Coyote and the Laughing Butterflies by Harriet Peck Taylor.
• The Spirit of Butterflies: Myth, Magic, and Art by Maraleen Manos-Jones.
• Charlie the Caterpillar by Dom DeLouise.
• Butterfly Girl by Catherine, C.N. Ashley.
• Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou, China by Jin Dan, Xueliang Ma, Mark Bender.
• Our butterflies and moths;: A true-to-life adventure into the wonderland of the butterfly world and its related insect kingdom as seen through fact and fancy, fable and folklore by William H. Howe.
• The Wing by Ray Buckley.
• LA Mariposa Bailarina/the Butterfly Ballerina (Historias Para Dormir) by Carlos Ruvalcaba, Francisco X. Mora.
• The Butterfly: A Fable by Jay Singh.
• The Beautiful Butterfly: A Folktale from Spain by Judy Sierra, Victoria Chess.
• The Rainbow Butterfly by Bozena T. Klejne, Halina Wenzel.
• Jaguar Woman and the Wisdom of the Butterfly Tree by Lynn V. Andrews.
• Butterflies by Njara Hjalmar.
• Butterfly Kisses by Sheraleen, Braganza.
• Mariposa Mariposa: The Happy Tale of LA Mariposa the Butterfly Told in Two Languages by Joe Hayes.
• Sun Girl: A True Story About Dawamana, the Little Hopi Indian Maid of Old Oraibi in Arizona-- And of How She Learned to Dance the Butterfly Dance at Moencopi by Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Elizabeth White.
• The Changing Caterpillar (Books for Young Learners) by Sherry Shahan.
• Ms. Butterfly & Old Bumblebee by Hattie Thompson Small.
• The Butterfly Boy by Jeanne M. Lee.
• Butterflies Carried Him Home, and Other Indian Tales by Colette Gauthier Myles.
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24) Butterfly fairy tale books.
• The Butterfly's Dream by Ippo Keido, Kazuko G. Stone.
• Butterflies by Njara Hjalmar.
• The Butterfly King, A Legend for the New Millennium by Larry K. Stephenson (Illustrator), Patti Weinbrenner.
• The Magic Butterfly and Other Fairy Tales of Central Europe by George Fontana (illustrator), Ugo Obligado (author).
• Butterfly Fairytale Books Series I: Set of Six Books (Butterfly Fairytale Books Series I) by Rene Cloke.
• Butterfly Fairytale Books Series II: Set of Six Books (Butterfly Fairytale Books Series II) by Rene Cloke.
• The sky-blue butterfly: A fairy tale for girls by James Byrnie Shaw.
• Butterfly Fairytale Books Series I: Set of Six Books (Butterfly Fairytale Books Series I) by Rene Cloke.
• My Fairytale Library: (Slipcase with 6 Titles from Butterfly Series II) (Butterfly Series II) by Rene Cloke.
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(This web page updated 3/15/05; 12/10/06; 4/1/08)