by Jeff Noon
It was only with the uncovering of the third manuscript in 1959 that the world paid any real attention to the obscure 'tongueless monk of Barnstrop'. How this Latin text found its way from a tiny Lancastrian village to the abandoned library of a household in Dusseldorf has yet to be fully mapped. It was found there by the antiquarian Sir John Bosley, who published his English translation in 1962, the year of his death. This coincidence, of translation and death, has not been overlooked.
Bosley called his translation The Cabinet of Night Unlocked, a rather poetical rendering of Olmstaff's original Latin. Despite this, his work, being of an overly academic nature, attracted interest only from his fellow scholars. The public imagination was stirred only when Lechner later brought the manuscript to their attention.
For all our academic distaste at Professor's Lechner's shallow popularization, and our suspicion of his decadent lifestyle (a known drug-user, associate of Timothy Leary, and a champion of the Acid Tests) we have to admit that but for his death, the Olmstaff Method (as it became known) would still linger in obscurity.
Many have claimed to have seen the public appearance Lechner made in 1974, at which he performed the Olmstaff ritual; only a few can have actually been there. None of them would be unchanged by what they saw.
To say it was my fortune to have been in that audience is to stretch the meaning of the word too far. I was on a short university tour of America at the time, promoting my second book, Morality and Death in the Age of Mass Destruction, and found myself sharing a platform with the charismatic professor. I had no knowledge of his work, but we quickly found ourselves on the same side against the rest of the panel. Our shared position was to make suicide a legitimate undertaking, given the discovery and proliferation of the nuclear bomb. One of our opponents was a bishop of the Roman Catholic faith, so you may picture the ferocity of the arguments. This bishop (I shall refrain from mentioning his name) had read Lechner's Sacred Wound, and was making a mockery of the book's heretical claims. That Lechner was calling the book a religious text 'produced by a brother of your very church!' and a work of God's bounteous goodwill, obviously hit a bare nerve, because the bishop (no doubt to his eternal shame) called for him to offer proof of 'the Devil's sacrament!'
Lechner paused for a moment then, as though drawing strength. He told the bishop that the ritual took approximately fifteen minutes to perform, and that he had no intention of boring the audience for that length of time. The bishop insisted, however, and took a straw poll of the audience. It was a close count, and it may well be that my own raised hand tipped the balance. Who can tell?
'Very well, then,' Lechner said, quite calmly.
He closed his eyes and began to mumble some Latin phrases to himself. I was seated two places along from him, and could only catch a word here and there, and my Latin was nothing like it is now. Every so often he would raise his arms to make some complicated patterns in the air. At one point, perhaps after five minutes, he touched his left hand to his heart. A little later he stamped his right foot. During these movements he was continuously whispering the Latin text. The audience had laughed to begin with, but quickly became bored. Only the bishop could be heard making a spluttering sound.
I had glanced at my pocket watch as Lechner began the ritual, and after thirteen minutes passed, I was becoming quite tense. Even the bishop lapsed into silence as the final minute ticked away. Somebody in the audience dropped a notebook, and the sound of it echoed around the hall, causing me to jump in my seat. But fifteen minutes came and went, and Lechner was still intoning to himself, and so I started to breathe again, and even to smile a little, especially when Lechner opened his eyes finally and smiled right back at me.
The bishop guffawed a final time, and made some derogatory remark.
Lechner closed his eyes, let his head fall gently to one shoulder and then down to his chest. He appeared quite relaxed, and the audience was talking loudly amongst themselves. Some of the rowdier students were even booing, and demanding their money back.
The bishop had risen from his seat, and was now slapping Lechner on the back, calling him a liar and even a false prophet. The professor leaned forward under the force of the slap, until his head was resting on the podium. A glass of water, touched by his forehead, tumbled to the floor, where it smashed.
A silence, deeper than before, once again fell over the auditorium.
Somebody laughed, but then stopped, as the bishop pulled Lechner's head away from the desk. His eyes were closed, his lips still fixed in that beatific smile. Of course, like the bishop, I suspected an aimless joke was being pulled, or that a drug-induced torpor had been achieved. I went over to admonish Lechner for bringing our argument into disrepute, but no words from me would rouse him. I started to shake him vigorously, all to no avail.
I demanded an ambulance be called immediately, which announcement caused a small commotion in the audience. A few students were making their way to the platform, some more were hurrying out; the vast majority of them were fixed to their seats, as though in reflection of Lechner's fate.
By this time the bishop had moved away slightly, and was crossing himself, as though fearful of the consequences.
Perhaps he was already thinking of his own guilt.
The media were slow to pick up on the story, which hiatus allowed me to find a copy of Lechner's book, The Sacred Wound, in an alternative bookshop on Haight-Ashbury. I was still badly shaken by the professor's strange death, especially when, three days later, the story finally made the local press. I spent a few tense minutes in Customs coming home; it felt as though I was smuggling the work into Britain.
The book had never been published in this country, and never would be. Of course, an enterprising party quickly produced a pirate edition, which was said to fetch a handsome price on the black market. Mine was one of the few legitimate editions.
I was determined to keep an open mind about its contents, but for some reason I hid the thin volume within my prized first edition of Vesalius' De Humanis Corporis Fabrica. There it rested for another two weeks, unread, as the strange story of the American professor who had 'killed himself with words' briefly made headline news. The few details released told only of a doctor's puzzlement at the exact cause of Lechner's death.
Only when the story had faded, did I dare peruse The Sacred Wound for myself.
It was a short book of ninety-nine pages, barely more than a self-produced pamphlet. It was arranged in four sections, the longest being Lechner's introduction. This introduction consisted of the already mentioned biography of Brother Olmstaff, a brief history of the Method, a pseudo-scientific explanation of the Method's effectiveness followed by a plea for its acceptance, and finally a set of guidelines for the correct performance of the ritual.
Lechner had traced the Method back to certain obscure, forbidden texts said to have been lost in the fire that destroyed the Library at Alexandria. He has no explanation as to how Olmstaff came upon these original manuscripts.
The second two sections of the book detailed the Olmstaff Method itself: first the text to be spoken, secondly the movements to be made. Lechner wisely divided the two elements to prevent the casual reader from accidentally performing the ritual in its entirety. The professor made it clear in his guidelines that the two elements, the words and the movements, were completely safe if performed separately; only when combined would they activate the body's natural processes.
Still, as you can imagine, I read these two sections with no little trepidation.
The final section of the book was Lechner's improvisation upon the Method's spiritual meaning, which owed a rather heavy debt to Leary's LSD-fuelled take on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This section is, perhaps, the least interesting.
Indeed, finishing the book still 'alive', as it were, led to a feeling of anticlimax.
And, although I decided I had witnessed nothing more than one of life's sadder coincidences, that night in San Francisco, nothing would make me perform the ritual
as per the instructions.
Nothing more was heard of the Olmstaff Method for a few years, until Dr Elizabeth Cunningham published her paper, 'On the Body's Self-Destruction', in the Journal of Alternatives, September 1985. This offered for the first time a medically approved explanation of the Method.
The fact that Cunningham was later arrested for murder should not prevent us from admiring her pioneering and courageous work. In the simplest terms the doctor had discovered a small gland (which now bears her name) in the lower abdomen. The gland had been noted previously, but no use had been found for it. Cunningham connected it to the Method in a very precise way: the combined performance of the spoken text and the ritual exercises activated the gland, which then, and only then, secreted a small amount of poison into the bloodstream. This poison (Lechner's Fluid) very quickly, and quite painlessly, overcomes the body's defences. Death follows within twenty seconds of completing the Olmstaff Method.
Cunningham's work, of course, was highly controversial, not least the fact that she had experimented on human guinea pigs, two of whom had died during the process. Both of them had terminal cancer. They were willing victims, and the doctor had signed-disclaimers proving such. This did not prevent her arrest and subsequent trial for assisted murder, of which she was found guilty. She received a sentence of not less than twenty years.
Cunningham's cause was championed by the euthanasia lobby, who campaigned vigorously on her behalf, alas with little effect. The doctor was found dead in her cell on 1 August 1989. No explanation could be given for her demise. Her trial and death brought the Olmstaff Method to the forefront of public consciousness.
One should not be surprised at this. Suicide has been a constant companion to the human struggle for progress. Before the Method came to light, it was thought that the human psyche contained a fail-safe against self-destruction; witness people's pathetic attempts to hold their breath for long enough to suffocate, or the violent convulsions that pull even the most desperate back to the surface of the darkest lake.
The Olmstaff Method broke this hold over the body's defence, with the added quality of guaranteeing an entirely painless death. Of course, this last fact cannot be empirically verified, but all witnesses of the ritual (myself included) can point to the beatific smile and relaxed posture that accompany the final moments. To quote Lechner's most famous sentence: 'God has provided an off-switch.'
Despite the fact that nineteen separate studies have shown the Method to be a legitimate process of the human physiology, none of the world's governments could be persuaded to make it a legal act, or to allow publication of any books offering instruction. The incident in Denmark sealed the Method's fate, and was the strongest proof yet of its universal effectiveness.
Prior to the incident the world had hardly noticed the so-called Offspring of God's Illumination, beyond a few rumours of the cult's supposed 'sexual worship'. Even the good people of Copenhagen were taken by surprise at the extent of the group's beliefs, when all 207 members were found dead one icy cold morning in October 1992.
The bodies were tested by the Danish authorities for drugs or any other means of self-destruction. It was no surprise to me that they found none, and that the group's final statement gloried in the 'next life that awaited all true believers, through the portals of the Sacred Wound'.
The fact that the Method was undertaken in the Danish tongue is of interest, and can be briefly examined here. It should be remembered that Lechner himself had performed the sacrament in Latin, even though his own book gave the text in plain English. In the introduction to The Sacred Wound he notes that the ritual can be spoken in Latin or English, although he believed the Latin expression to be more pure, 'closer to the wound itself, as he puts it.
Around this time I happened upon an edition of Sir John Bosley's The Cabinet of Night Unlocked. Curiously, although the book is long out of print, it has never been banned in this or any country. Certainly, Bosley's is an academic study, and his translation from the Latin is dense with secondary and tertiary meanings. It is of little use to any but the most convoluted or desperate mind.
It is interesting to compare Bosley's version with Lechner's, mainly because Lechner had simplified the more complicated passages, and even eliminated entire sentences in his quest for the purest form. Both versions are effective, which leads one to believe that the exact nature of the text is of less importance than the overall 'truth' of the sacrament. The same leeway is allowed with the accompanying movements, with different cultures producing their own, slight variations.
Hundreds of illegal translations have been made over the years, and all of them activate Cunningham's Gland successfully. One curious exception is the pictograph language of the K'dhall Islands in New Guinea. Here the Method does not work. Research continues into why this should be so.
Is it any wonder that the Method became so popular? The suicide rate increased noticeably as the ritual became known, not least in death cells around the world. For the victims of painful incurable diseases, it is quite easy to find a doctor who, for a price or for his conscience, will tutor the sufferer in the correct words and the movements. Other stranger rumours abound. For instance, Lechner had stated that the Vatican held similar manuscripts in their vaults, and that the facts had been suppressed for centuries in order to maintain the Christian way of death. Certain warrior sects had known of the Method as long ago as the tenth century, using it to ensure that captured soldiers could kill themselves without succumbing to torture. The US Army is said to have employed the Method in the Vietnam War. It is, perhaps, not entirely untrue that the Method was used to effect a kind of escape from the Nazi concentration camps. One famous, perhaps non-existent heretical text is said to contain certain proof that Jesus the Son of God used the Method in his dying moments on the Cross.
My own obsession with the Olmstaff Method is fuelled by my professional interest in the morality of suicide, and by my personal involvement in the first reported case. With these two not unworthy weapons at my disposal, I was, after a lengthy bureaucratic battle, allowed a brief perusal of the original Cabinet of Night Unlocked.
Sir John Bosley, in his last will and testament, had bequeathed Olmstaff's manuscript to the British Museum, where it was expressly to be kept under lock and key in the rare volumes chamber. I was escorted there, one dismal afternoon in December of last year. I was allowed only one hour with the volume, and the guard was to be with me the whole time, whether for protection of the manuscript, or for protection of the reader, I cannot say.
How strange it was, that one hour. The manuscript was kept under glass, and was open at the page that began the sacramental text. The calligraphy and the illuminations were of the highest standard, far higher than Olmstaff's other known works. So rich were the colourings, I almost felt they were rising out of the parchment towards me. It was, quite literally, a pleasure to gaze upon it.
I had learned a little more Latin since my first (and last) meeting with Professor Lechner, and I tried as best I could to decipher the work's meaning. I mean not the textual message discovered by Bosley, nor the wild extrapolations given flight by Lechner; rather I was seeking the hidden message of the work. The mechanism — the magic, if you will — that allowed a few words, marks on paper, to affect the human body so drastically. And always, as I read, how could I not be aware that Bosley, Lechner, Cunningham, and perhaps Olmstaff as well, had all taken advantage of the Method. They had all died by the book.
I came out of the museum early, twelve minutes before my allotted time was up, and never before had the dirty London rain felt so glorious on my face!
I will finish this short history with an account of my own experiments with the Method. My main preoccupation is to establish the exact limits of the ritual's effectiveness. For instance, I have already agreed with Lechner that the words and the movements are quite harmless when performed separately, by the simple expedient of performing them myself. I have followed his instructions precisely during these exp
eriments.
During the last few months I have taken to performing the words and the movements together in various combinations; for example, speaking the words in reverse order, or making the movements in mirror-image. None of these variations has had any effect upon my body.
I am currently in the process of performing the Method in its correct order, but stopping off at various points to ascertain the cumulative effects. From these experiments I can conclude that the first ten minutes of the sacrament have no obvious effect at all. Only at the eleventh minute does a certain lightheadedness descend upon the body. It is not unpleasant. At the thirteenth minute this is replaced by a momentary fear, which may be a physical symptom of the Method, or else a legitimate emotion brought about by the approach of death. The fourteenth minute passes almost unnoticed.
As the final passages of the Olmstaff Method are undertaken, a feeling of intense expectation and desire takes over the whole body, as though it were eager to complete the ritual forthwith, and to leap joyously into the realms of darkness!
It is only with immense self-will that I have managed to hold off from making that final execution. To descend from such heights so crudely brings with it a despair I would never have thought possible.
I have only a single word left to say, and a single movement to make.
The word is 'circumference'. The movement, a gentle touching of the right thumb and middle finger, to form a small circle of flesh.
Thus.
SUPER-EASY-NO-TAG-SPECIAL
So they threw me out of Strangeways with a packet of stale fags and the clothes I went in with. And a letter from the governor praising my good-boy behaviour and my spirited reform, and claiming I was perfectly capable of holding down an honest job, given the chance. Right, so that's why the last thing inside, they stick this tagging device around my left ankle. Radio bleeper, satellite mapping, locking encryption, nifty little sonic ball-and-chain. I had to wear the thing for two years, two years of being followed, of having my every movement logged on some giant cop computer. Don't ask me how the thing works, I'm just the guy that has to sport the accessory. Two years of never leaving Manchester.
