Why Urns?

People often ask me about my fascination with urns. Although I would never have an urn in my home (creep-city) I just find the concept of urns to be very interesting. While the university I attended did not offer a Masters program in urns (they had one in art history, but that was too general for me), I sometimes do some amateur research on the subject. Whose idea was it to use urns? Why do we save our ashes in containers? Why do we even turn bodies into ashes? Why is the human race so obsessed with the body? Have there ever been any human-shaped urns? These are all questions that I have thought of, and I hope to explore these issues, among others, in this site.

In an effort to keep things as least morbid as possible, I'm going to try to maintain a tone of detachment from the actual theme of death in terms of personal experience. This is a pseudo-scholarly research project. I say “pseudo” because I am by no means a scholar, and this site is more an exploration of my fascination than anything else. I may ramble a bit off topic, but I do hope that by the end of my writing of this site that I will have at least come up with at least a few more questions about life and death and ashes, even if I don't come up with any answers.

I'll talk about the history of urns, the philosophy behind them, ancient ones, modern ones, the artistic kind and those shaped like teddy bears. I'll talk about theories and ideas, and I'll talk about life. This is not a religious exploration, but more of a general discussion of something people don't seem to talk that much about.