  A fundamental motif in frustrated magnetism is the fully mutually coupled
cluster of $N$ spins, with each spin coupled to every other spin. Clusters with
$N=2$ and $3$ have been extensively studied as building blocks of square and
triangular lattice antiferromagnets. In both cases, large-$S$ semiclassical
descriptions have been fruitfully constructed, providing insights into the
physics of macroscopic magnetic systems. Here, we develop a semiclassical
theory for the $N=4$ cluster. This problem has rich mathematical structure with
a ground state space that has non-trivial topology. We show that the ground
states are appropriately parametrized by a unit vector order parameter and a
rotation matrix. Remarkably, in the low energy description, the physics of the
cluster reduces to that of an emergent free spin-$S$ spin and a rigid rotor.
This successfully explains the spectrum of the quadrumer and its associated
degeneracies. However, this mapping does not hold in the vicinity of collinear
ground states due to a subtle effect that arises from the non-manifold nature
of the ground state space. We demonstrate this by an analysis of soft
fluctuations, showing that collinear states have a larger number of soft modes.
Nevertheless, as these singularities only occur on a subset of measure zero,
the mapping to a spin and a rotor provides a good description of the quadrumer.
We interpret thermodynamic properties of the quadrumer that are accessible in
molecular magnets, in terms of the rotor and spin degrees of freedom. Our study
paves the way for field theoretic descriptions of systems such as pyrochlore
magnets.
