Since the dawn of religions, we’ve beckoned the gods to intervene in our world – including four-thousand years ago, when rituals were created to worship Mitra so that they might harness the Sun in the face of climate change and the fall of empires. Today, we are increasingly relying on theories that once again look towards the skies: in planetary modelling and solar geoengineering. But this time our incantations are not ritualistic scriptures but routine scripts. We ask, how much have our models changed over millennia as we try to control “Nature”?