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!'