“None of the Suns” is probably the most explicitly post-punk and gothic song on One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2 . Its imagery seems almost designed for that genre: demons, blood, darkness, blackness, angels, Heaven, and the disappearance of daylight. Yet the song becomes much more interesting when those images are placed alongside Manson's own explanation of it. He has connected the song to his love of post-punk and goth music, but also to his fascination with Lewis Carroll and Carroll's relationship with nighttime. Manson has described “outrunning daylight” as a way of cheating death, which gives the night a meaning beyond gothic atmosphere. He has also cited Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit as an inspiration for the atmosphere of the song. The painting accompanying the song, which Manson calls “We're in the Black Now,” is his own image caught somewhere between day and night. That may be the most useful place to begin with the song, because the darkness here d...
“None of the Suns” is probably the most explicitly post-punk and gothic song on One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2. Its imagery seems almost designed for that genre: demons, blood, darkness, blackness, angels, Heaven, and the disappearance of daylight. Yet the song becomes much more interesting when those images are placed alongside Manson's own explanation of it. He has connected the song to his love of post-punk and goth music, but also to his fascination with Lewis Carroll and Carroll's relationship with nighttime. Manson has described “outrunning daylight” as a way of cheating death, which gives the night a meaning beyond gothic atmosphere. He has also cited Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit as an inspiration for the atmosphere of the song. The painting accompanying the song, which Manson calls “We're in the Black Now,” is his own image caught somewhere between day and night. That may be the most useful place to begin with the song, because the darkness here does not seem to exist simply as the opposite of light. Manson's figure is caught between the two.
The opening verse immediately establishes that something has already gone wrong:
“Bad bad seeds are making
Bad bad fields of flowers
All the prayers were answered
Just not ours”
The image of bad seeds producing fields of flowers suggests that corruption has become something capable of reproducing itself. Whatever happened has not remained an isolated event; it has produced consequences that continue to grow. In the context of the album, it is easy to associate this with the betrayals, accusations, hostility, and personal conflicts that surround much of Manson's writing, but the song does not remain concerned only with external enemies. “All the prayers were answered / Just not ours” turns the situation inward. The speaker is not simply describing a world that has become hostile. He is describing himself and another person as having been excluded from the order that was supposed to protect them.
That becomes even more apparent in the next lines:
“And our blood is beating
Beating our door down
Looking for the demons inside
Inside, inside, inside”
The repetition of “inside” is important because it prevents the demons from being understood simply as external enemies. The blood itself seems to be searching for what has been hidden within, as though something buried inside the self has become impossible to contain. Blood is particularly appropriate here because it represents both life and continuity. Even when everything else has supposedly reached “the end of everything,” the blood is still beating. Something primordial remains.
That becomes particularly significant in the larger album, where Manson has spoken about sobriety and the consequences of his past. Whatever battles exist outside the self do not necessarily disappear when the outside world changes. There are still things within that have to be confronted, and the demons are not simply the people who attacked him. Some of them belong to the person who survived those experiences. The blood that is “beating our door down” can therefore be understood as something that refuses to let those buried parts remain hidden.
The song then arrives at the condition that gives Manson's accompanying painting its title:
“We're in the black now
At the end of everything”
Manson's description of the painting is significant because he does not portray himself as simply consumed by darkness. He describes the figure as existing somewhere between day and night. “The black” therefore sounds less like a final destination than a state of suspension. Something has ended, but the next state has not yet been reached.
There is a more precise alchemical possibility behind the song's language of blackness and its strange celestial imagery. The phrase "We're in the black now" can be read in relation to sol niger, the Black Sun, and to the nigredo, the blackening or putrefaction traditionally associated with the beginning of the Great Work (magnum opus), the alchemical process through which one state is broken down and transformed into another. In this stage, the existing substance is broken down, dissolved, or reduced before it can be transformed into something else. This makes “at the end of everything” particularly suggestive. The end described here does not necessarily have to mean annihilation; it can mean the destruction of a previous state of being.
The refrain then makes the alchemical possibility considerably stranger:
“All of the moons
And none of the suns
Together we run
Away from the day light”
What is unusual is not simply that Manson places the speaker in the night, but that he creates an impossible celestial order in which there are “all of the moons” and “none of the suns.” There is an intriguing precedent for taking the plurality seriously in alchemical literature. In the Counsel of Marriage, or Concerning the Mass of Sun and Moon, an alchemical text asks explicitly, “Why did he set many Suns and Moons?” and answers that the spirit and soul proceed not all at once but “little by little, part after part, successively.” The same text describes the Moon as shining by borrowed light from the Sun, while repeatedly treating Sun and Moon as complementary principles within the Great Work. There is no reason to assume that Manson was referring to this particular text, but its existence demonstrates that multiple Suns and Moons are not foreign to the symbolic language of alchemy.
There is another relevant image within this alchemical tradition: the hermaphrodite child of the Sun and Moon. Eighteenth-century alchemical works used the figure of a hermaphroditic child to represent the conjunction of solar and lunar principles, with the two opposites joined in a single transformed being. The imagery is particularly significant because it does not simply erase the distinction between Sun and Moon; it brings them together so that something new can emerge from their union. In works such as The Hermaphrodite Child of the Sun and Moon, the solar and lunar symbols appear repeatedly throughout a sequence of alchemical emblems, alongside other images of death, dissolution and transformation. There is no reason to assume that Manson is consciously referring to this particular work either, but the imagery provides an illuminating contrast with “None of the Suns.” Where the alchemical hermaphrodite represents Sun and Moon brought together, Manson gives us “all of the moons” and “none of the suns,” as though one half of the conjunction has disappeared. The song therefore seems to suspend the process before the opposites can be reconciled, leaving the speaker within the dark, lunar side of a transformation that has not yet reached its completion.
Manson's formulation, however, is different and much more extreme. He does not give us many Suns and many Moons; he gives us all of one and none of the other. The ordinary relationship between Sun and Moon has therefore been radically disturbed. There are innumerable Moons, yet no visible Suns to account for them, creating an almost impossible celestial order in which the reflected image remains while its apparent source has disappeared.
This also changes the way “outrunning daylight” can be understood. On the most immediate level, the line belongs to the gothic world Manson has described: the speaker and the person accompanying him belong to the night and are trying to remain beyond the reach of the day. But Manson's own explanation gives daylight a more personal meaning when he describes “outrunning daylight” as a way of cheating death. The darkness is therefore not simply a place to hide from the world; it becomes a way of extending existence beyond the limits imposed by daylight.
The alchemical imagery makes this desire more complicated still. If the “black” can be associated with the nigredo, then the speaker is not simply hiding from the Sun. He is inhabiting a stage in which an earlier state has already been broken down, while the transformation that might follow has not yet been completed. He remains inside the black, before whatever comes next.
The word “together” also matters. This is not simply a solitary figure retreating into darkness. There are at least two people running, and that gives the darkness an element of intimacy. They are creating a private world outside the ordinary rhythm of day and night.
This is where Lewis Carroll becomes relevant. Manson's fascination with Carroll was connected not simply to the strange worlds of his fiction, but to Carroll's own relationship with nighttime and the way he used the hours of darkness in his personal and creative life. His diaries contain numerous examples of him working late into the night. Even more revealingly, his nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood described Carroll as a poor sleeper who had devised a system for taking notes in the dark when a “happy thought or ingenious problem” occurred to him during a sleepless night. The night, in other words, was not simply an imaginary setting for Carroll. It could become a productive extension of his waking life, a period in which he continued to think, create and work outside the ordinary boundaries of the day. This makes Manson's idea of “outrunning daylight” particularly interesting: like Carroll, he seems fascinated by the possibility of extending existence beyond the normal limits imposed by daylight, although Manson gives that impulse the much darker implication of trying to cheat death.
This is also where Walter Russell becomes more significant to the song than his mere mention elsewhere on the album might initially suggest. In the music video for “As Sick as the Secrets Within,” Manson explicitly invokes Russell's The Secret of Light, which establishes Light as part of the intellectual and symbolic vocabulary surrounding this album cycle. Russell's cosmology does not treat apparent opposites as completely independent forces locked in a simple battle with one another, but emphasizes relationships, cycles and transformations in which what appears to be one condition can give rise to another. That makes the strange wording of the refrain worth examining closely. Manson does not sing “all of the moons and none of the light.” He sings “all of the moons / and none of the suns.” The distinction matters because the Moon does not produce its own visible light. What we see from the Moon is reflected sunlight. A world containing moons but no visible suns is therefore not necessarily a world in which illumination has been completely destroyed. It is a world in which the original source of visible light is absent while something of that light continues to appear indirectly.
The Moon consequently becomes an appropriate image for the state in which Manson places himself. The Sun is no longer directly visible, yet something of its light remains. This fits the larger pattern of the album, in which one state repeatedly seems to survive by becoming something else. Heaven and Hell can exist within the same person; angels can become liars; the living can take on the imagery of the vampire; and the person who once existed in daylight can enter the black without ceasing to exist.
That leads naturally into Toby Dammit, which may be the most revealing of Manson's stated inspirations for the song. Fellini's film is about an actor who arrives in Rome exhausted, alienated and increasingly detached from the world around him. One of Toby's first complaints concerns the artificial lights surrounding him during a media blitz, and he identifies himself explicitly with the night:
“I'm a night person. I hate light. Yes, I hate it.”
That line is striking beside Manson's:
“Together we run
Away from the day light”
The connection is more than an aesthetic resemblance. Toby's hatred of light is bound up with his hatred of the world in which he finds himself. He is surrounded by cameras, television, interviews, publicity and people who expect him to continue performing the role of Toby Dammit. He is constantly visible, but that visibility does not make him understood. The artificial light becomes almost oppressive.
Seen in that context, Manson's daylight can represent more than death. It can also represent exposure: the public world, judgment, celebrity, accusation and the demand to remain visible. Darkness offers the possibility of disappearing from that world, allowing the individual to exist without constantly having to perform for everyone watching.
But Fellini's film also provides a warning about what happens when escape becomes indistinguishable from self-destruction.
Toby becomes fascinated by the mysterious little girl carrying the white ball, whom he identifies with the Devil. She is frightening, but he is also drawn toward her. His desire to escape the world around him eventually becomes a movement toward the very thing that will destroy him. This is what makes Toby Dammit such an effective reference for “None of the Suns.” Darkness is attractive precisely because it offers an escape, but the thing that offers escape can also become the thing that consumes you.
The same contradiction appears when Manson describes himself as:
“a long dark well
For you to fall down
Keep the chain around your neck
If there's anyone left to love”
The image of the well may contain another possibility. The four lines can be read as parts of a single descent: “I'm a long dark well / For you to fall down,” followed by “Keep the chain around your neck.” A chain would allow something lowered into a well to remain connected to the surface and potentially to be drawn back up again. Manson never identifies what is being lowered, but the image nevertheless creates an interesting tension between falling into darkness and remaining connected to what exists above. If the well represents the speaker himself, then whatever descends into him is entering the deepest and darkest part of his interior world, where the demons mentioned earlier are waiting. The chain can therefore be understood as both a tether and a restraint, suggesting that intimacy with him means entering his darkness without necessarily losing the possibility of return. The final line, “If there's anyone left to love,” makes the image more poignant still. At the bottom of this well there may be pain, memory and demons, but there may also be something the speaker is still hoping someone will find. What remains uncertain is whether anyone is willing to make the descent.
The connection between Toby Dammit and Edgar Allan Poe makes the imagery even more appropriate. Fellini's film draws from Poe's “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” in which Toby repeatedly makes reckless wagers involving the Devil. His habitual phrase is:
“I'll bet the Devil my head.”
Fellini transforms Poe's grotesque joke into something much more psychological. The Devil becomes a mysterious child, the wager becomes an attraction to death, and Toby's reckless desire for escape carries him toward the abyss. The connection is useful because it adds another dimension to the idea of “running away.” Escape can become a wager. The thing one runs toward may ultimately be no safer than the thing one is trying to leave behind.
The religious imagery reinforces this uncertainty:
“Heaven will be over
Faster than a knife fight
In a phone booth
Filled with angels who lie”
The “phone booth” image is almost absurd, but the final line is not. Heaven itself has become unreliable because it is populated by lying angels. The problem is therefore not simply that the speaker has been expelled from Heaven and entered Hell. The categories themselves have become unstable.
This connects closely with “All the Vilest Things,” which ends:
“I've got heaven on my mind
I've got hell in my heart”
In that song, Heaven and Hell coexist within the same person. “None of the Suns” seems to take that divided consciousness and place it in an environment where the distinction between the two has become even harder to maintain. The demons are inside, the angels lie, and the speaker exists between day and night.
That is where Milton's Lucifer becomes relevant. Manson's longstanding fascination with the fallen angel makes Paradise Lost an obvious literary point of comparison, but the connection is more interesting than simply identifying Manson with Lucifer. Milton's Lucifer is a figure who has lost the world that previously defined him and must construct a new identity after the Fall. Looking at Hell, he tells himself:
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
He then famously declares:
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
What matters here is the psychological problem behind those declarations. Lucifer has fallen, but he has not ceased to exist. He must determine what existence means after the loss of the world that gave his identity its former shape.
That is close to the condition of “None of the Suns.” The speaker has reached “the end of everything,” but there is still something left. His blood is beating. He is still running. He still has demons to confront. The old world has ended, but the person who inhabited it remains.
The line that follows the second chorus pushes that uncertainty to its bleakest point:
“Sometimes is better than all times
But not as good as never”
There is a peculiar exhaustion in these words. “Sometimes” acknowledges that existence contains moments worth having, but “never” offers an escape from the entire cycle. In the context of the album, it can certainly resonate with addiction and sobriety, but it is broader than either. It sounds like weariness with repetition itself: the repeated movement between suffering and relief, destruction and recovery, attachment and loss.
The eclipse imagery associated with the music video for “Unalive” provides another visual expression of the same idea. An eclipse does not destroy the Sun; it temporarily prevents the viewer from seeing it. “None of the Suns” takes that phenomenon to an almost metaphysical extreme: instead of one Sun temporarily disappearing behind the Moon, there are now “none” of them. Yet the Moon remains, and with it the reflected light of something that cannot presently be seen.
That is why the painting “We're in the Black Now” may ultimately be as important as the lyric. Manson's figure is not simply swallowed by darkness. He is between day and night. The image therefore captures the central condition of the song: not a completed transformation, but the uncertain interval in which the old identity has been stripped away and the next one has not yet fully emerged.
The condition is the disappearance of the familiar light without the disappearance of the person who once lived beneath it. The speaker has entered the black, but he has not ceased to exist. His blood is still beating, the moons are still present, and the demons are still inside him. Even the dark well contains the possibility that something might still be found at its bottom.
This makes the alchemical imagery especially important. The nigredo is not the completion of the Great Work but the stage in which the old substance is broken down before transformation can occur. Likewise, the alchemical imagery of the Sun and Moon ultimately points toward conjunction, most strikingly in the figure of the hermaphroditic child born from their union. Yet Manson gives us a world in which there are “all of the moons” and “none of the suns.” The conjunction has not taken place. The speaker remains in the black, somewhere between the destruction of what was and whatever might emerge from it.
Perhaps that is ultimately why Manson's image of himself caught between day and night is so important. He is not simply a figure who has chosen darkness over light, nor is he someone who has successfully emerged from it. He occupies the interval between states. The old world has ended, but the new one has not yet revealed itself. The Sun has disappeared, but the song never quite allows us to believe that everything associated with it has disappeared as well. The moons remain, reflecting a light whose source can no longer be seen; the blood continues to beat; something remains at the bottom of the well. “None of the Suns” therefore ends not with the completion of transformation, but with transformation still in progress. The darkness may be the place where the old self has been broken apart, but what will emerge from it remains unknown.