descended from the ancient Druids?
No, and we have our doubts about any group that claims a direct connection to the original Druids; the evidence simply doesn’t support such claims. The AODA was originally chartered in 1912 in Boston, Massachusetts, as the American branch of the Ancient and Archaeological Order of Druids, which was founded in 1874 in London by Robert Wentworth Little. Behind the AAOD lies a long history of English Druid Orders and churches as well as less formal groupings, reaching back to the beginning of the Druid Revival in the second half of the seventeenth century. Although the Revival drew on a variety of Celtic sources, among many other things, there’s no evidence that any of it can be traced back twelve hundred years or more to the time when the original Druids still existed.
