Mary Catherine and Gregory Bateson. 
 
New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987. Octavo. Blue paper wraps. Spine toned, also soiling near the spine and on the text block, very light foxing. 205 pages. Uncorrected advance proof. Very good.
 
Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Gregory Bateson joined the faculty of Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz in 1972. This is what he worked on in his dying days, the last intellectual gasp of the all-star anthropologist, completed by his daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (chapters divided into essays by each and dialogue). The elder Bateson, like us, believed that the "world partly becomes—comes to be—how it is imagined." Death and the divine as participant observation? People say he was a genius.
 
"They will come after me
And use the little that I said
To bait more traps
For those who cannot bear
          The lonely
                Skeleton
                      of Truth"