Penis Envy mushroom history: the true story behind the name

Few mushroom names travel as fast as this one. Penis Envy mushroom history, as it is usually told, runs from an Amazon cattle pasture to an unsolved murder in Texas, with a famous psychedelic explorer in between. It is a great story. The trouble is that most of it was never written down anywhere you can check.

We went looking for the paperwork while making our documentary, Penis Envy: The Mushroom Behind the Myth. Here is what we found: where the name comes from, which parts of the legend are documented, why the mushroom looks the way it does, and what a recent lab comparison measured.

Each finding carries a label. Established means primary records, or independent sources that agree, show it directly. Preliminary means it rests on one study, one person’s account or unmeasured reports. Unresolved means the evidence conflicts or does not exist.

What is the Penis Envy mushroom’s scientific name?

Its scientific name is Psilocybe cubensis, the same species as most cultivated magic mushrooms. It was first described from Cuba in 1906 as Stropharia cubensis, and the GBIF database records its transfer to the genus Psilocybe in 1948 (GBIF; Bradshaw et al., 2026).

“Penis Envy” has no formal standing: it is neither a species nor a botanically named variety. GBIF lists it only as a common name for P. cubensis, alongside Golden Teachers and Cubes. It is closer to a dog breed than a new organism. Evidence: established.

Why is it called Penis Envy?

The phrase is older than the mushroom. “Penis envy” is an idea from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Britannica calls it a “highly controversial assumption”, and later analysts, including Karen Horney, rejected it (Britannica, Freud; Britannica, Horney).

How it ended up on a mushroom is less clear. The obvious answer is shape: a thick stem and a cap that hugs it. In 2009 the journalist Hamilton Morris called the mushroom “about as natural as a cocker spaniel”: a line shaped by people, not found in the wild (Morris, Vice, 2009).

The only first-hand account of the naming comes from the cultivator who says he developed the line. He told Morris it began as a joke in 1977. He showed a bag of his mushrooms, then known as “Amazons”, to some exotic dancers. They laughed at the shape, and he asked if they had penis envy (DoubleBlind; Leafly, 2022). No document from 1977 backs this up. Evidence: preliminary.

The Penis Envy origin story everyone repeats

The popular version goes like this. Terence McKenna brings spores back from the Amazon. A Texas doctor named Steven Pollock grows them and finds a strange, thick-stemmed form. Just before he is murdered, Pollock mails a spore print labelled “Penis” to a grower in Washington State, who keeps the line alive. Years later, a spore company sells it under the name Penis Envy.

Morris set out that chain in Vice in February 2009 (full text in Vice’s Portuguese edition). For years it served as the standard history (Leafly, 2022), and magazines were still retelling it in 2021 (MEL Magazine, 2021). Each link deserves its own look.

1971: the McKenna brothers at La Chorrera

This part comes from someone who was there. In early 1971, Terence and Dennis McKenna travelled to La Chorrera, a remote settlement in the Colombian Amazon, in search of an obscure preparation containing DMT. Instead, in Dennis McKenna’s words, “robust clusters of P. cubensis sprouted from nearly every cow pie” in the pastures around the mission (McKenna, 2021).

He also writes that they carefully collected the spores and brought them home. Whether any of them became Penis Envy is another matter. Evidence: preliminary for the find (one first-hand account); unresolved for the link.

Steven Pollock: a real scientist and an unsolved murder

Steven Hayden Pollock was a San Antonio physician who published on psilocybin mushrooms in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in the mid-1970s (Pollock, 1975). In 1977, during a mycology congress in Tampa, Florida, he and the mycologist Gary Lincoff found a mushroom that Pollock came to realize was new (Harper's gives the month as August, while the 1978 description dates the type collection to 3 September 1977: Guzmán and Pollock, 1978) (Morris, Harper’s, 2013). He and the taxonomist Gastón Guzmán described it as Psilocybe tampanensis in 1978 (GBIF).

On 31 January 1981, Pollock was found shot dead in San Antonio. He was 33. Three suspects were never charged, and the murder remains unsolved (Harper’s, 2013; MEL Magazine, 2021).

Here is the striking part. Morris’s own long investigation of the murder, published in Harper’s in 2013, never mentions Penis Envy in the text we read. We found no document from Pollock’s lifetime that connects him to the strain. Evidence: established for his life and death; unresolved for any link to Penis Envy.

2009: the article that stitched it together

Morris wrote his 2009 story as a comic, first-person adventure, and it holds the strongest clue against itself. When he phoned Dennis McKenna, McKenna said the strain was news to him and that he had never heard of it (Vice, 2009).

Morris later returned to the subject. The notes to his podcast episode “The True Story of the Penis Envy Mushroom”, released publicly on 1 April 2022, admit that “many apocryphal origin stories have been disseminated (sometimes by me)” (The Hamilton Morris Podcast, 2022).

The Rich Gee account: a grower tells his side

That episode is a long interview with a cultivator who wrote under the pen name Rich Gee. Gee co-wrote a 1977 book on psilocybin mushrooms with Jule Stevens, published in Seattle (Wellcome Collection). In 2009, Morris had tried and failed to find him, and learned the name was a pseudonym (Vice, 2009).

Two commercial outlets, the psychedelics publisher DoubleBlind and the cannabis marketplace Leafly, reported the interview. In their telling, Gee says the spores did come from McKenna’s Amazon collection, but reached him through his co-author Stevens and a friend who had them from McKenna, not through Pollock. One of Gee’s cultures showed a mutation: caps that would not stand up, and many stunted mushrooms (DoubleBlind; Leafly, 2022).

He says he cloned it repeatedly, picking large mushrooms that bruised strongly blue, and that the phallic shape was a side effect. He says he met Pollock but never discussed cubensis strains with him. He called the mailed-print story “baloney from the very beginning”, and said Pollock never even knew where he lived (DoubleBlind).

Is it true? It may be. DoubleBlind found Gee’s photographs and background convincing but called the account hard to verify. It is one witness, recalling events more than four decades later, with no document from the time to check it against. Evidence: preliminary.

Penis Envy mushroom history: what is documented and what is repeated

When was the name Penis Envy first used?

We could not find the name in any document from the 1970s or 1980s. The earliest dated use we could verify is a Shroomery forum thread of 16 November 2005, “Penis Envy 6..whats the real deal?”. Its posters discuss PE and a hybrid, PE6, as known strains, so the name was already familiar to the people posting (Shroomery, 2005).

By 30 January 2008, a strain guide on the same forum said the McKenna brothers found Penis Envy in the Colombian Amazon, citing “various sources” (Shroomery, 2008). It does not link Pollock to Penis Envy. He appears only under a different strain, also sold as “Amazonian”, which the post traces to a Mexican village. The earliest Pollock link we found is the Vice article a year later.

The same guide adds a Gee: it says many thought the strain lost until a forum member found a seller, named as “Rick Gee”, offering it. It does not say whether he is the 1977 co-author. DoubleBlind also reports that Morris and others found “the first recorded photograph of the then-unnamed Penis Envy mushroom” in Gee’s 1995 book, Cubensis Aquarium Gardening, which we could not find in library catalogues. Evidence: unresolved who the seller was; preliminary for the photograph.

So the timeline runs backwards from the paperwork: a reported photograph in 1995, the name by 2005, McKenna and a seller called Gee by 2008, Pollock by 2009, and Gee’s 1977 naming story by 2021. Evidence: established for the dated documents; unresolved for the true starting date.

Why does Penis Envy look different?

Wild P. cubensis looks fairly ordinary. A 2025 description from northeastern Argentina gives caps 40 to 80 mm across that open out flat, a lasting white ring on the stem and a blackish-blue spore print (Batista et al., 2025).

Penis Envy is described differently, and consistently: a thick stem, a cap that barely opens and hardly reaches past the stem, and few or no spores (DoubleBlind; Leafly, 2022). DoubleBlind notes that a mushroom dropping so few spores would soon die out in the wild, which fits a line kept going by people.

Two peer reviewers in British Columbia summed up the lore in 2021: “a towering fruiting body with a pale cap and missing partial veil”, kept going by cloning. They called the story “anecdotal at best” (McKernan et al., 2021, peer review).

No study we found measures these traits. A 2025 review shows photos of Penis Envy types but says its strain notes come mostly from “non-academic, community-based reports” (Kurzbaum et al., 2025). Even the 2026 lab study below checked its strains partly by appearance. Evidence: consistent but unmeasured, so preliminary.

What the genes say

Genetics offers firmer ground. In 2021, Kevin McKernan and colleagues sequenced a P. cubensis genome from dried stems labelled “P.envy”, obtained in Somerville, Massachusetts, noting that “The strain name is anecdotal” (McKernan et al., 2021). They found an extra stretch of DNA, about 4,600 letters long, in a gene the mushroom uses to make psilocybin. What it does is still unknown.

In 2023, a larger study compared 86 commercial cultivar genomes, sequenced by McKernan’s group, with 38 wild ones from Australia. McKernan was a co-author, so the two findings are not independent. One genetic cluster held six cultivars, five of them labelled Penis Envy, including the 2021 genome. Those five “were homozygous across most chromosomes, which suggests they have been highly inbred” (McTaggart et al., 2023). The authors suggest such lines may come from one parent mushroom, or from cloning.

That fits the story of a line kept alive by copying itself. It does not show who did the copying, or when. No study has yet shown which gene, if any, causes the Penis Envy shape. Evidence: preliminary (one study for each finding, from overlapping teams); unresolved on the cause of the shape.

What a side-by-side lab comparison found

In July 2026, researchers in Israel and the Czech Republic published what they call the first methodologically controlled comparison of multiple P. cubensis strains in an academic context (Sharchaton et al., 2026).

It was not the first study to include this strain, at least by its initials. A 2025 study from Israel grew 42 strains under the same conditions, including a cubensis strain labelled simply “PE”, though the paper does not discuss it on its own (Cohen et al., 2025).

The 2026 team grew 14 named strains, each in its own chamber under identical conditions, then freeze-dried them and measured six related compounds. Psilocybin led in every strain, but totals differed widely.

Psilocin is psilocybin with its phosphate group removed (Lenz et al., 2020). The figures show how far strains grown alike can differ, not that a name predicts a result. Evidence: preliminary, because this is one batch per strain from one laboratory.

What the study cannot tell you

• Each strain was grown as one batch and measured as one pooled powder sample, so a good or poor batch cannot be told apart from the strain.
• Single mushrooms differed. In six strains tested one by one, psilocybin varied by 12.8% to 23.4% (coefficient of variation). Penis Envy was not among them. As the authors note, an average “can shift depending on which fruiting bodies are sampled”.
• DNA barcodes were nearly identical across all 14 strains. They confirm the species, not the strain.
• The authors conclude that species identification alone “cannot reliably predict the psychoactive compound content”.

Why the legend outgrew the evidence

If the record is this thin, why does everyone know the story? Part of it is the name, which Reggie Harris, founder of the mushroom-testing group Oakland Hyphae, called “brilliant marketing, period” (Leafly, 2022).

Part of it is repetition. Psychologists call it the illusory truth effect: statements we have heard before feel truer than new ones, even when we know better (Fazio et al., 2015). Nearly two decades of retelling on forums and in magazines gives a story that kind of weight.

And part of it is the gaps. Collecting and breeding happened in secret, so key people used pen names and the history moved by word of mouth. As the 2023 genome study puts it, cultivar pedigrees “exist in lore but are not authenticated” (McTaggart et al., 2023). Every gap left room for a better story.

Watch the film

Our documentary Penis Envy: The Mushroom Behind the Myth follows this trail in about ten minutes, with every claim labelled on screen. Watch it on YouTube or browse all our films.

Next, read our history of magic mushrooms, from Mesoamerica to the 1957 Life article, see why magic mushrooms turn blue, or try our surprising stories of psychedelic Toronto. Stay curious, and check the date on this page: we will update it if new records turn up.

Shroomverse sells mushroom products. This article is general information about history and science. It is not medical, legal or purchasing advice, and it does not recommend any product.