Robert Earl Burton, a one-time elementary school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, is the unchallenged ruler of the Fellowship and doesn’t face questions, she said.

Not about his living like a king, not about a lifestyle said to rival a ruler in the last days of the Roman empire, not about the nuclear Armageddon that Burton proclaimed would happen in 2006, not about whether the Fellowship is following the “Fourth Way” system of spiritual development taught by two 20th-century Russian philosophers and mystics, Haven said.

“If you challenge him you have to leave the cult,” she said. “No one can understand how crazy this can get.”