The promise of eternal life is a threat unless you get to start over. The mythmakers knew that. They weren't dummies, man. … They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn't fuck with the code or the rhymes didn't work; and if the rhymes didn't work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. Smell me?

Chapter 45: Respawning, Character: Laney Price - Daemon (2006)