Several years ago, we embarked on a threefold series of youth courses on Druidism. The Bardic Youth Course, which was first launched in 2006, began the story of Taliesin the Bard who takes the student on a journey of Druid wisdom and knowledge. In 2012, this story was continued in the Ovate Youth Course. Today, Taliesin's story will finally be completed with the third and final course of this trilogy: the Druid Youth Course.

The Druid Youth Course draws from the knowledge and wisdom already obtained in the previous two courses, and adds new knowledge and wisdom to it. The student becomes more familiar with the Celtic Otherworld through myths and meditations, and with the importance of the Ancestors. This course will also help the student with the practicalities of setting up his or her personal Druid Altar, and performing simple (seasonal) rituals.

The course is, as of today, available on the Grove of Dana, our Online Druid College. In addition, it is also available as printed book which can be purchased at our online bookshop:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/new-order-of-druids/the-roots-of-the-forest/paperback/product-24163837.html

The Druid Youth Course is available for free for all NOD members. While it is primarily aimed at a younger audience, there are no age limits for enrolling. However, the minimum age is 13 (unless the laws in your country dictate otherwise), and students younger than 13 need to provide a parental approval slip before beginning the course. 

It should be noted that you can only enrol in the Druid Youth Course, if you have completed the Bardic Youth Course and Ovate Youth Course first. It is not possible to skip courses in the series of youth courses, and there is no placement exam. All these courses are also free, and also come with mentor guidance.

If you had already read the books of the Bardic and Ovate Youth courses, and you can't wait to find out how the story unfolds, you can already purchase the book from our online store. You can buy our course books without having to enrol in the course, however the course assignments are not listed in the printed books. 

You can find all the books of the youth courses here:

1. BARDIC YOUTH COURSE: ENTERING THE FOREST

2. OVATE YOUTH COURSE: WALKING WITH TREES

3. DRUID YOUTH COURSE: THE ROOTS OF THE FOREST


The first two books are also available in Dutch ("Leerling van het Woud" & "Wandelen met Bomen"). The Druid Youth Course will probably become available in Dutch next year.
You can find all currently available course books at our bookshop at this link: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/neworderofdruids

On an additional note, we would like to point out that the youth courses have recently been revised. This means that we have done some slight layout improvements and filtered out some spelling errors; the contents of the course largely remains unchanged. If you are currently enrolled in any of the youth courses, we advise to re-download your course package, to have the latest version of your course handbook. If you already had purchased the printed book, you don't need to buy it again in order to be able to take the course. This applies to the Bardic Youth Course (both English and Dutch) and the Ovate Youth Course (only English). 

The Celtic Polytheism Course is one of the specialisation courses available to our Upgraded Members. For quite some time, we have attempted to find mentors to guide students in this course, but unfortunately we have been unsuccessful. For this reason, we have decided to make some changes to the course.

As of today, the Celtic Polytheism Course is no longer available as a mentored two-year class, but instead as a self-study course. This means that you can enroll in this course and immediately have access to all the chapters of the course (of what was previously both year one and two). As it is a self-study concept, the course will not be mentored. A course forum has been made available for students to interact with each other on the course material. However, one part of the original Celtic Polytheism has been left out: the Seership chapters. These will be reworked into a new Seership Course, which when ready will be made available with mentor. 

The Celtic Polytheism Self-Study Course is still only available for Upgraded Members, as will other specialisation courses currently being prepared.

The website of the New Order of Druids has now been optimized for mobile access. This means that visitors who want to access our website using a smartphone, will be able to navigate and use the website in a much more user-friendly way. When accessing the website on a smartphone, you will automatically be redirected to m.druidcircle.org and to the mobile layout of the website. At the very bottom of every page, you will find a link to switch to "desktop version" in case the regular layout of our website works better on your device.

Most of the website's functionality is now also available on the mobile version, including account registration, profile, activity wall, and so on. Other parts of the website, such as the forums, private messages and the college, are also accessible on a smartphone, although the display may not be optimal at all times. Depending on which part of the website you are trying to access, it may be best to hold your mobile device horizontal, while other pages will be better viewed with your mobile device held vertically. If a page does not appear properly on your screen either way, it is recommended to access it on a regular laptop or desktop computer instead.

As there are so many different smartphone brands and models out there, all with different screen sizes, as well as different operating systems, browsers and personal settings, it is impossible for us to guarantee that the mobile version of our website will be configured optimally for display on all these devices. Nonetheless, we hope that our new mobile website will be configured for optimal use on most of the currently commonly used smartphone models. 

Recently, there have been some changes in regards to the NOD Nature Donation Fund. This fund was created in 2010 with the aim of gathering funds based on the amount of upgraded membership payments we receive. For every upgraded membership, we set aside 5 € (per year) which is then added to the fund once a year. The fund's beneficiary is The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit organisation active all over the world with preserving life and nature.

Recently, The Nature Conservancy has discontinued their "personal fundraiser pages", which means NOD's fundraiser page was removed as well. While we regret this decision of TNC, it does not affect our fundraising and donations to their nature preserving efforts. However, we like to maintain some transparancy as to our Nature Donation Fund. Since it is no longer possible to track our annual donations on the personal fundraiser page, we have decided to set up a page of our own, on our own website. You can now find all information about the NOD Nature Donation Fund at this link, where we provide a list of our yearly donations - from 2011 until now - in both USD and EUR. The page also contains a donation button for those who want to make a direct donation to The Nature Conservancy. This page will be updated every year when a new donation has been made by NOD.

In the past week, the website has been experiencing problems with logging in, incorrect password resets and frequently timing out.

We are happy to announce that these issues have finally been resolved now, and everything should be working normally again.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

The website is currently experiencing frequent downtime issues, which often result into a 503 timeout error when e.g. trying to login to your account, use the "forgot password" function or some other parts of the website.

We are working with our server provider and are trying to resolve this issue as soon as possible. If you expierence issues with the website, feel free to try again at a later time. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

We are also aware that the "forgot password" function is not working properly in regards to the actual password reset. Due to these timeout issues, we can't work on fixing this issue until the timeouts are resolved first. 

Due to vacation, the general & membership administration, and the webmaster departments will be unavailable between Sunday, July 8 and Tuesday, July 17.

Thank you for your understanding.

NOD offers a Free Celtic E-Card Service. The software has recently been renewed and now offers more than 70 e-cards. Check out this link:

http://ecards.druidcircle.net/

We are happy to announce that the website of the New Order of Druids is back online, after a week of intensive work on software upgrades.

At first glance, the website will not look very different from before, as the layout remains mostly the same. Nonetheless, the software behind it has gone through many changes and improvements. This has allowed us to resolve some issues. For example, the problems with uploading images to your gallery, have now been fixed, and you can add your photos to your profile's gallery as well as to the Activity Wall.

The largest change is that of the Grove of Dana - Online Druid College, where we have implemented new software that is much more user friendly. The old software is still available too for existing students, as the course progress could unfortunately not be imported into the new software.

If you are an upgraded member who upgraded prior to August 22, 2017, we have good news for you. To compensate for the week's downtime of the website, we offer you a free extension of your upgraded membership for one full month. You don't have to do anything for this, the expiration date has already been corrected for you to one month later. 

Please keep in mind that some minor upgrades will still take place in the upcoming days or weeks. This means that the website might be offline for short times every now and then, although we will try to limit that to an absolute minimum.

We hope you enjoy the renewed website!