Penis Envy.

What's known

Here's what's meant to be true and not.

What we actually know

• It is a plain Psilocybe cubensis, an artificially selected strain of the species, not a hybrid with anything else and not a separate mushroom.
• Its defining trait is physical: a thick, swollen stem and a small rounded cap that tends not to open. That's why the name stuck.
• Because that cap barely opens and the gills stay largely enclosed, the mushroom sheds little or no spore, so genuine Penis Envy prints are notoriously sparse, slow and hard to obtain.
• When it does deposit, the spore mass is the usual cubensis dark purple-brown to near-black; the strain's standout characteristic is the scarcity of the deposit rather than any proven difference in the spore itself.
• It is one of the most-named and most-imitated cubensis strains in circulation, which is also why so many variant names (PE6, Uncut, Albino PE) trade on the original.

What the community says

• The most-repeated story has Terence McKenna collecting a giant wild cubensis in the Colombian Amazon around 1971 and the spores travelling west from there. Treat the details as lore, not record.
• An early version credited the medical doctor and mushroom enthusiast Steven Pollock with isolating the phallic look before his unsolved 1981 death. That attribution is now openly disputed.
• By a later and competing account the actual selection work was done by mycologist Rich Gee (reportedly Richard Gutierrez), who is said to have received the strain through a third party (his coauthor Jules Stevens) rather than from Pollock at all.
• The journalist who popularised the Pollock version (Hamilton Morris, in a 2009 piece) later said he had been misled about it, which is a fair warning about how much of this strain's history is hearsay.
• The name itself is said to come from a 1970s quip, when some onlookers called the mushrooms 'donkey dongs' and Gee shot back, 'do you have penis envy?' Colourful, and entirely undocumented.

Where it came from

Most famous cubes are famous for their looks or their lore. Penis Envy is famous for both, and for being a quiet headache to actually collect from. This is a Psilocybe cubensis that someone, somewhere, selected hard for a single dramatic shape: a fat, swollen stem and a small, rounded cap that mostly refuses to open. The whole reason a collector covets it is the whole reason it is a pain to print.

The backstory reads like a thriller and should be taken with the same pinch of salt. By the most-repeated account the strain traces to a wild Psilocybe cubensis collected in the Colombian Amazon around 1971, often attached to the name Terence McKenna. From there it gets murky. An early telling credited the doctor and mushroom enthusiast Steven Pollock, who was murdered in 1981, with isolating the look. A later and competing version, told by the mycologist Rich Gee, says the selection work was his and that he never received anything from Pollock at all. The writer who popularised the Pollock chapter reportedly admitted afterwards that he had been misled. So we genuinely do not know who first fixed this shape, and we are happy to say so.

Penis Envy is the cube everyone has heard of and almost nobody can print. The trait that makes the photo iconic is the same trait that empties the spore drop.

What to expect at the scope

Here is the microscopy warning. Because that rounded cap stays shut, the gills never spread and present the way an open cubensis cap does, so a Penis Envy fruitbody tends to shed very little, sometimes nothing at all. When it does deposit you get the usual dark cubensis spore, perfectly good under oil, but you may be working with a sparse, sporadic print rather than the heavy black sheet a B+ gives you. That scarcity is part of why a real PE print is treated as a prize.