pyspark error does not exist in the jvm error when initializing SparkContext

I just had a fresh pyspark installation on my Windows device and was having the exact same issue. What seems to have helped is the following:

Go to your System Environment Variables and add PYTHONPATH to it with the following value: %SPARK_HOME%\python;%SPARK_HOME%\python\lib\py4j-<version>-src.zip:%PYTHONPATH%, just check what py4j version you have in your spark/python/lib folder.

The reason why I think this works is because when I installed pyspark using conda, it also downloaded a py4j version which may not be compatible with the specific version of spark, so it seems to package its own version.

PySpark recently released 2.4.0, but there's no stable release for spark coinciding with this new version. Try downgrading to pyspark 2.3.2, this fixed it for me

Edit: to be more clear your PySpark version needs to be the same as the Apache Spark version that is downloaded, or you may run into compatibility issues

Check the version of pyspark by using

pip freeze

Instead of editing the Environment Variables, you might just ensure that the Python environment (the one with pyspark) also has the same py4j version as the zip file present in the \python\lib\ dictionary within you Spark folder. E.g., d:\Programs\Spark\python\lib\py4j-0.10.7-src.zip on my system, for Spark 2.3.2. It's the py4j version shipped as part of the Spark archive file.

You need to set the following environments to set the Spark path and the Py4j path.
For example in ~/.bashrc:

export SPARK_HOME=/home/hadoop/spark-2.1.0-bin-hadoop2.7
export PYTHONPATH=$SPARK_HOME/python:$SPARK_HOME/python/lib/py4j-0.10.4-src.zip:$PYTHONPATH
export PATH=$SPARK_HOME/bin:$SPARK_HOME/python:$PATH

And use findspark at the top of the your file:

import findspark
findspark.init()