I managed to throw this error and get past it. This is definitely a YMMV answer, but I leave it here in case it eventually helps someone.
In my case, I was running a homebrew installed spark (1.2.0) and mahout (0.11.0) on a mac. It was pretty baffling to me because if I ran a mahout command line by hand I didn't get the error, but if I invoked it from within some python code it threw the error.
I realized that I had updated my SPARK_HOME variable in my profile to use 1.4.1 instead and had re-sourced it in my by-hand terminal. The terminal where I was running the python code was still using 1.2.0. I re-sourced my profile in my python terminal and now it "just works."
The whole thing feels very black magicky, if I were to guess some rational reason for this error being thrown, maybe it's because one moving part assumes a different spark version, architecture, whatever than you have. That seems to be the solution hinted at in the comments, too.