Belongs To Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Lakes gathers four bodies of standing water that religious traditions treat as sacred on their own terms, and the group's real point is how little the four have in common beyond the water itself.

The Amrit Sarovar is the sacred pool surrounding the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, at Amritsar, excavated under Guru Ram Das and completed under Guru Arjan, the fourth and fifth Sikh Gurus, and the namesake of the city that grew around it. Lake Manasarovar, on the Tibetan plateau beside Mount Kailash at about four and a half thousand metres, is held sacred by four separate religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bon, and its Sanskrit name records a tradition that Brahma formed it in thought; Buddhist geography calls it Anavatapta, and the headwaters of the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra and a Ganges tributary do in fact rise nearby.

Lake Titicaca, on the Peru Bolivia border at 3,800 metres, is where Inca tradition places the emergence of the sun and of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, the dynasty's founders, from the Island of the Sun, and the earlier Tiwanaku civilisation built its own ceremonial centre on the lake's southern shore. Lake Texcoco is the shallow, partly saline lake at the heart of the Valley of Mexico on whose marshy islands the Mexica founded Tenochtitlan in 1325 CE, after seeing the eagle on the cactus they read as a sign from Huitzilopochtli marking the end of their migration.

Four traditions, four continents, and no shared origin story between any pair of them.