A persistent concern of social anthropology of death has been to map dying and death within the meaningful matrices of myth, ritual actions and communitarian regeneration. This article embedded within the said legacy, departs from the convention in minor ways. It seeks to locate the agency of the dead as a specific kind of subject–object, focusing on the newly dead rather than on the dying and the fresh ancestors. The newly dead are those for whom the transition from the material–spectral state into a new embodiment must be observed through the proper processing of the dead. The article maps this realm of the newly dead in relation to the institutional practice of cremation in Denmark, Europe. The entry into the ethnographic understanding of the Danish context is informed by my previous fieldwork on the subject of cremation at Banaras, India. This article mainly borrows from my fieldwork at Aarhus, while Banaras serves as an alert backdrop. The specific object of enquiry that guided my research in Aarhus was to locate the controversial initiative to redirect the heat generated during the cremation process, for civil, municipal use. Locating the controversy, I argue, enables one to address the nature of institutional imaginaries involved in the processing of the newly dead. It further helps us to show how these imaginaries persist within a multiplicity of shifts such as new scientific inventions, Nazi use of cremation techniques, aestheticisation of funerary objects and the availability of commercial merchandise as funerary objects. In the ethnographic contextualisation of this multiplicity, the emphasis is on highlighting both the imaginaries of the proper processing of the dead and the doing of the proper. In this regard, the article poses the question: Is there any link between the myth and the proper observance of funerary procedures? It argues that the biblical version of singularity appears integral to the institutional imaginary of processing of the newly dead in Aarhus, just as scientific vision and communitarian sentiments are constitutive of it.