Photography:Bali High

John Stanmeyer / VII
That's the spirit Stanmeyer's photos offer an intimate and at times dreamlike presentation of Balinese religious life

People get weird ideas about Bali. The Eat, Pray, Love brigade likes to see it as a crazy occult isle, its sarong-clad populace in thrall to wraiths and babbling shamans. Every other tourist who has drunk a lemongrasstini on Kuta Beach goes gaga for Bali, mysterious land of animist phantasms lurking behind every 7-Eleven, instead of Bali, a place of ordinary people preoccupied with workaday stuff like paying grocery bills and saving for a new scooter, who, in their spare time, don't always stand in front of the nearest shrine in a tongue-lolling trance but watch TV and check their Facebook just like the rest of us.

For these reasons, another book on Balinese spirituality doesn't sound inviting so much Orientalist dross has been published on the topic already. But Island of the Spirits , a series of 56 black-and-white Holga photographs, will fry the brain with its raw power. Taken by John Stanmeyer founder of the heavyweight VII photo agency and a TIME contributor these images are united in their hallucinatory beauty. They could have been taken in 1910 or 2010. They have the heightened emotionality of a fever dream. They are stunning.

A foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis is there if you really must believe that Bali is a place (in Davis' words) "where every daily act ... takes on ritual significance, becoming a prayer for the well-being and survival not just of the community but of the entire universe." Oh, please! Far better to head straight for the pictures. Here's a man in the throes of religious derangement, stabbing himself as part of a purgative ritual. There lies a body awaiting cremation, relatives caressing the face and combing the hair of the deceased in tender preparation. Images of grief, fire and ecstasy follow one another in delirious succession, punctuated by photographs of ethereal silence like that of three worshippers collecting seawater, or that of a kris being raised to the sky.

Those who propound the idea of Bali as a place of singular spirituality have harmed their cause through hyperbole and cant. With these extraordinary images, Stanmeyer makes a fresh and more arresting case.