Nina Paley is at it again! As part of her film-in-progress, Seder-Masochism, Nina animated pictures of ancient female figurines. They look like they are dancing, in 24-frame cycles. She posted them as 24 Free Goddess Gifs. They have enchanted people, who have given them various soundtracks and set them dancing. Personally, I am delighted by how the set of 24 look dancing together, as they are on Nina’s own page. I have composited the 24 individual Goddess gifs into a single animated gif. It is linked below, and is freely available for you to enjoy and re-use.

Here they are, the 24 Goddesses in one animated gif (12.9MB):

24 Goddesses, composited into one gif

Do you want to know more?  Of course you do.

Nina Paley’s film in development, Seder-Masochism, started as an animated look at the Jewish Passover story. Over the years Nina seems to be recognising a different story from the material she’s created: the story of how humans left the Nurturing Garden, walked out on the Divine Feminine, to create the nature-dominating, male-centric gods and civilisation we have today. Her end-2017 “progress report” sums up where she stands, and has a couple of marvellous animations besides.

Nina animated the 24 Goddesses as components of another Seder-Masochism scene. All them are images of ancient sculptures or figurines, from various parts of the world. Art historian Alexandra Kiely wrote a nice summary of each goddesses history at The Real Story of the Goddess Gifs.

Paley released yet another fabulous song, You Gotta Believe, in late January 2018. It features these goddesses as lead and backup singers and dancers.

My composite is released, like Nina’s 24 gifs, “to use for whatever. Free Culture. No permission needed. Go crazy. I love you.”  You are welcome to link to this page, http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2018/01/31/24-free-goddess-gifs/ . To download the gif itself, the URL http://go.jdlh.com/24freegoddessgifs should be stable .

I made the composite using the ffmpeg tool. The details of how I got it to work might be interesting for other ffmpeg users. But that’s a subject for another blog post.

[Update 2018-02-01: correct some URL spelling, shrink the big gif to fit the layout. —ed]