The Fellowship of Friends built its life around a place. On oak hills near Oregon House, California, the group planted a celebrated vineyard and winery, called Renaissance, raised a lodge filled with European art and opera performances, and named the settlement Apollo, all in service of founder Robert Earl Burton's teaching that a conscious community should surround itself with beauty against a coming collapse.
Burton, a former schoolteacher who adapted the Fourth Way vocabulary of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, made specific predictions, a California earthquake for 1998 and a global catastrophe for 2006, which members marked and which passed unfulfilled, the group absorbing the failures as tests of understanding. The community's legal history has been dominated by its founder. Civil suits filed in 1984 and 1996 by former members alleged that Burton sexually exploited young men in the group under the cover of spiritual authority; both were settled out of court, and further accounts by former members, collected by journalists and by ex member networks online, describe the same pattern across decades. The Fellowship denies wrongdoing and continues, smaller than at its peak, with centres in many countries feeding members and money toward Apollo. For scholars of the Fourth Way's many descendants, the group stands as the movement's most opulent and most litigated branch, a test case of what happens when the teaching of self remembering is fused to one man's unaccountable authority.