Virginia Beane Rutter served for many years on the National Board of ARAS as a representative from San Francisco. In this edition of ARAS Connections she presents an extraordinary series of modern paintings about the Amor and Psyche myth. Virginia has been a student and scholar of women’s initiation patterns and ceremonies for decades. She is in the fine lineage of early followers of Jung who comprised his 1929 dream seminar. These students were asked by Jung to study the archetypal dream symbolism of a Swiss businessman, one of whose dreams had the powerful image of a large cauldron filled with metal objects, some of which were crescents and some of which were crosses. The early group was divided into two and Joe Henderson joined Esther Harding’s section which focused on the “crescent”. This began both Henderson’s and Harding’s life long interest in rites of initiation in men and women. It is safe to say that Virginia Beane Rutter has carried on that early tradition in an unparalleled way in terms of her study of art, archaeology, and psychology. Most importantly, she knows initiation patterns in depth from her exquisitely careful and insightful clinical work. It is rare for an analyst to be both scholarly adept and clinically astute. Beane Rutter’s studies of women’s initiation appear in three books, Woman Changing Woman: Restoring the Mother-Daughter Relationship, Celebrating Girls: Nurturing and Empowering our Daughters and Embracing Persephone: How to be the Mother You Want for the Daughter You Cherish. In addition, she has collaborated with Tom Kirsch and Tom Singer in editing Initiation: The Living Reality of an Archetype. And most recently, Virginia has teamed up with Tom Singer to co-edit two books based on their Greek Santorini Conferences. The first, Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche: Archetypes in the Making will be followed this spring by Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche: Archetypes Evolving. Whether Virginia is exploring the dreams of modern women and men or the ancient wall paintings of Thera in Santorini, she brings the same beautiful eye to unraveling and understanding the mysteries, myths and dreams of ancient and modern people alike. In a later edition of ARAS Connections another spectacular paper will be published on the Santorini wall paintings and the ancient Greek patterns of young women’s initiation rites they portray.