Stories and words have wills and rages...

This is from a wonderful book I'm currently reading on the Greatness of Saturn:

Ramanjan wrote in the preface to his book Folktales from India: ”Stories and words not only have weight; they also have wills and rages, and they can take different shapes and exact revenge against a person who doesn't tell them and release them into the world…. They are there before any particular teller tells them; they hate it when they are not passed on to others, for they can come into being again and again only in that act of translation. … If you know a tale, you owe it not only to others but to the tale itself to tell it; otherwise it suffocates…. Traditions have to be kept in good repair; transmitted, or else, beware, such tales seem to say, things will happen to you. You can't hoard them.” (Ramanujan 1991, p. xxx - xxxi)

He tells of the Bond tribal who possessed four stories which he was too lazy to repeat. One night, when the Gond was fast asleep, the stories emerged from his belly, sat on the snoring lout, and conspired together to kill him because he refused to tell them to anyone. The Gond survived only because his servant, who wanted the stories for himself, overheard the plot and was able to thwart each assassination attempt as it occurred. In another case, a song a woman never sang and a story she never told came forth from her mouth while she slept and metamorphosed into a man's coat and a pair of shoes, items which sent her husband into a fury of jealousy.

From The Greatness of Saturn: Therapeutic Myth by Robert E. Svoboda, Sadhana Publications, 1997.