Within the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and comparable modern Druid organizations, the Ovate grade sits between Bard and Druid and is generally described as the grade most concerned with the natural world directly: the cycles of the seasons, the study of plants and their traditional uses, divination in its various modern forms, and an extended engagement with death, ancestry and the passage between states, themes modern Druid teaching materials frequently describe as the Ovate's particular territory in a way the Bard and Druid grades are not. This emphasis draws loosely on the divinatory and sacrificial associations of the classical vates while adapting them substantially for a contemporary, non-sacrificial, ecologically minded practice.
As with the Bard grade, the specific content of the modern Ovate curriculum is a twentieth and twenty-first century construction rather than a recovered ancient course of study, built by modern Druid orders out of a mixture of the sparse classical record, comparative Celtic folklore, and contemporary Pagan and nature-based spiritual practice. Its position as the middle grade, following Bard and preceding Druid, is generally explained within the tradition as marking a shift from outward creative expression toward inward, more solitary and more demanding work, a progression the order presents as a deepening of practice rather than as a hierarchy of religious authority in the way the ancient druid, as judge and priest, plainly held authority the vates is not described as holding.