Lakes of the gods: sacred high altitude lakes of Uttarakhand, India

Our planet is believed to be filled with sacred natural sites that play an important social and religious role among diverse cultures around the world. Especially in India a lot of Prithvi, sacred sites, are related to planet Earth and numbers of rites are performed in its worship (Singh and Rana, Ch. 6; Weerasinghe, 2012). Especially water bodies are recognised as sacred in various cultural and religious beliefs around the world (Altman, 2002; Fallon and Jaiswal, 2012; Shaw and Francis, 2008).