Boris Hiesserer’s Interview

You certainly know his double sided artwork “True Sacrament ” which upon release was an immediate hit with Blotter art collectors as it reflected and vibrated by its depiction of the origins of LSD, the rye ergot. So you Know the Blotter, but did you know the story behind the artwork and who’s the artist?

  • Can you tell us your real name and artist name?
    My name is Boris Nikolaus Hiesserer, also known as Eden 123.
  • Date and place of birth?
    Germany, 1961
  • Nationality ?
    German
  • What make you choose your artist name (if different from your real name)?
    My artist name Eden 123 was given to me in 1986, one year after I founded ‘Pyromania Arts’ as the Dutch/German foundation of the non-dogmatic, non-sectarian, worldwide information network TOPY a.k.a. the ‘Temple Ov Psychick Youth’ of which I became an activist two years before.
  • Where do you live now?
    Since 34 years I work from Heidelberg and live next to the ‘Neckar’ river that runs through our small town in southern Germany.
  • Can you tell us about your academic / artistic background ?
    I am a freelancer and as a media-artist working with all kind of media. As an autodidact-expert in alchemy and shamanism and a member of the global consciousness-research community I worked under and with Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Sasha Shulgin and even Albert Hofmann. I documented and translated their talks and released a book entitled ‘Ecce Panis Angelorum – Holy Technologies of Visionary Culture’ about plant sacraments aka spirit molecules, the mother and the father of LSD, ancient fertility- and mystery-cults, holism and transcendance. With the creative tools nowadays accessible – analogue or digital – everyone (who dares) has uncountable options to gain artistic expression, as well as worldwide distribution..
  • How and when did you discover blotter art ?
    In the later ’70’s within the underground drug culture blotters with Superman or Mickey Mouse or sanscrit Om’s printed upon them found their way to me. And around the age of 18 the ‘Tetragrammaton’ blotter ‘Trip’ (as we Germans call a single hit) triggered my first breakthrough experience – even if then I couldn’t view the experience as a shamanic initiation, as the cultural knowledge and context was still missing by that time.
  • What drew you into creating your own blotter art ?
    When visiting the ‘Science & Fiction’ Festival on drugs, in Basel, Switzerland in 2018 I held a lecture on the ‘Cultural History of Ergot’. Here I met blotter artist pioneer Mark McCLoud again and got his request to create a blotter from one of my art designs, in cooperation with his friend and colleague Paul Guest (RIP). So Paul and I did choose the late 1890’s communion picture with it’s German text transformed into English – so the meaning would be understood more easy by more people. All the other editing to the former church graphic were already in place, as this picture is the main key-graphic for the LSD web-archive: www.mutterkorn.net As a former member of the ‘European College for Consciousness Research’ (ECBS), I did not hesitate to mention my real name when Monkey asked for the work title and the designers name.
  • How many blotter art pieces did you make ?
    The ‘True Sacrament’ blotter is the only blotter I’ve produced up to know.
  • Who printed and perforated your pieces then and now ?
    My work was printed and perforated in the UK by the (then largest) blotter producer Monkey aka Paul Guest, for my 2018 vinyl compilation set ’75 Years Ov LSD – Birthing the Inner Spiritual Child’. We were planning to continue to produce blotters together, but now that Paul has died I and many others lost that connection.
  • – What do you feel makes blotter art a unique art form ?
    I guess we have to view blotter as a form of media, a) in the sense that they are carriers of the mind-altering substance LSD and b) as they carry a symbol, logo or cartoon character upon them. Within the synergistic realms of an LSD-experience, in which many things become a multi-facetted deeper meaning, it therefore is of utter importance how the mind is triggered or even meta-programmed by one of the last symbols you saw before your psychedelic journey. In this sense the print on the blotter may even be part of the ‘set and setting’, which plays an important part of the outcome of a psychedelic journey into the soul.
  • What has blotter art brought to your creative process?
    Close to finishing my True Sacrament design I had to smile when I heard the muse whispering: “When these ever get activated it will be for the first time in history (of blotter-art) that upon the product will be pictured what is within the product” – Claviceps purpurea, or Ergot, or ‘Mutterkorn’ (mothercorn) – the mother of LSD.
  • What was your first blotter art creation ?
    The blotter-art ‘True Sacrament’ is 16 x 20 cm, perforated in 500 single 8 mm squares, each with an ‘ergot’-mushroom rye-fungi printed upon it’s back side.
  • What blotter art piece you made is your favorite and why?
    My blotter is not at all an act of heresy. To the contrary, I have put back in context what has been lost through the ages. Due to many projects such as the Mutterkorn.net website and the film DVD “The Philosophers Stone – 100 Years of Albert Hofmann” and my book on visionary culture I have collected many fragments of the sacred, the holy, the religious ideas, in the early days of humanisation, rooting in the first psychedelic earth religion: Shamanism – probably the oldest form of religion and human tradition – stretches back 10.000’s if not 100.000’s of years. Nowadays we have proof that psychoactive plant agents have been cultivated by our ancestors long before crop and goats.
    From 1500 BC to 400 AD this tradition was continually practiced during the great Mysteries of Eleusis and before the birth of the man called Joshua or ‘Jesus’ – in the 3rd century BC- the ancient Gnostic cults praised a mushroom as ‘Christos – the healer and redeemer’. A fact proven by linguist John Marco Allegro, responsible for the translation and deciphering of the death sea scrolls of Qumran. For a 12 minute virtual trip into the unbroken tradition of the ancient mushroom cults to modern Eucharist traditions like the feast of corpus Christi and to the Acid-House culture watch this video and listen to the first molecular tuning of Lysergic-Acid-Diethylamid: https://youtu.be/aOnG7xBS4wA .

When Paul visited Ann Shulgin in 2019, she signed a couple of different blotters to be auctioned off in support of the MAPS foundation, mine included. Paul was so kind to send me a signed blotter and this photo from the Shulgin home in California.

  • – Do you have a blotter art collection besides your own creations? If yes what is your most valuable piece?
    My most valuable piece is the Happy Birdday ( editor’s note: it’s indeed Birdday and not Birthday like on the bootleg edition) version of this ‘100 Years Albert Hofmann’ Blotter brought home from the LSD-Research Gathering ‘The Spirit of Basel’ in 2006. The film footage of Mark McCLoud’s Basel Blotter-Art Expo and some blotters from the internet were edited for a short music clip.
  • – What blotter art piece you didn’t make is your favorite and why?
    I very much dig this blotter called ‘Adeo Sanctum Est Vetus Omne Poema’ due to it’s simple arrangement and it’s mimetic alchemical assemblance as well as it’s red, brown and sand/stone-colorations
  • Which other blotter artist do you like/admire?
    I could tell you their work, but don’t know their names. Watch my blotter art video https://youtu.be/OryTWV-5CQA
  • What is your opinion about people tearing up blotter art to sell shards or so called “minis”?
    Imagine to cut up an Andy Warhol painting, only because he divided the canvas into four quarters. I guess that a whole piece of art should rather be conserved as a whole.
  • Do you have a website where you sell your blotter art ? If not where can people buy your creations?
    My blotter a.o. LSD-related music, films and artwork will be sold via our web store: shop.pyromania-arts.de and you can click the next link to get the True Sacrament Blotter Art
  • Any other favorite site you would like our readers to check out?
    Yes, the Webarchive with it’s LSD-chronicles called: www.Mutterkorn.net

the “75 Years Ov LSD” vinyl: can be found here:

Website + webstore: www.pyromania-arts.de

From mushroom cults to Eucharist tradition clip: https://youtu.be/aOnG7xBS4wA

  • – Anything blotter art related you would like to add?
    Even if it’s not likely that your blotter-art design is used and activated on the black market it should be printed with plant colors upon chlorine-free paper.

By the way, If anybody would like to swap. I can offer Mark McCloud’s unperforated ‘Dragon’ blotter in exchange for each and any blotter art you have left over.

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