I say no. It’s like if I give a vampire permission to enter my neighbor’s house - that won’t work.
The only difference between me and a judge is legal authority. Why should vampire magic care about the laws of man?
Why should it care about the religion of man, then?
For that matter, why should it care about the invitation of man?
If there are rules a vampire must follow, and those rules can be satisfied through the agency of human beings, having been interpreted by human beings, then we have to consider what a human being means by invitation.
If a 4-year-old invites a vampire into his parents’ house, does that count? It’s not his house, either. If you think that a vampire can enter on the invitation of a 4-year-old then you must concede that people other than the owner can invite someone in. If you think that invitation is not valid, then you must concede that a vampire respects a hierarchy of rights.
I think that the state asserts a right to invite other people into your house which supersedes your right to prevent them. We call that overriding invitation a warrant.
I don’t agree with that at all.
I don’t think the deciding factor here is literal ownership - what does a vampire care if you’re owning, renting, paying a mortgage, or living with your parents? Rather, it makes most sense that the deciding factor to whether you can validly invite a vampire into a given location, is if that location is where you live. So the 4-year-old can invite the vampire in because the 4-year-old lives there. I might also accept that a vampire can be invited in by anyone who is already inside. There are plenty of more consistent options than just those you described.
In your hypothetical scenario, if vampires were to somehow gain control of the government, could they simply pass a law stating all vampires are invited in all domiciles? Legal systems change and can vary wildly depending on location - it’s silly to think they’d have an effect on something based in magic, not law.
I think it’s easy to get sidetracked on “magic” vs. “law”. It seems clear to me that both of these ideas are tied up in human interpretation, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to have a disagreement about them, we’d simply look up the correct meaning for “magical rules that govern vampires”.
I suspect that we have a fundamental disagreement that we’re not going to resolve with debate, but I’ll take one more shot anyway.
I appreciate that you’ve given a pretty succinct definition of your position: to summarize, you can only invite someone to a place where you live, although you can also invite someone into a place when you are already inside that place, regardless of whether you live there.
Can a person who lives on the street invite a vampire? If so, then a vampire is circumscribed from any outdoor location where a person lives (sans invitation); and if not, we see that “where a person lives” is not actually the deciding concept.
If you own multiple homes, which of them do you “live” in? Can a vampire enter all the others? Do you have to be in the home at the time of the invitation, or could you invite a vampire to use your summer house for a month while you’re in your winter home?
All of these things cloud the idea that “living in” a place is not actually all that straightforward, and still requires the interpretation of mankind to be meaningful to the vampire. Indeed, I think the magic relies on the consent of a human, not the literal words of an invitation, and consent is innately tied to interpretation by the person consenting.
However, if anyone in the home can make the invitation, then I think the way this plays out is: the vampire cop gets a warrant, one of the other cops goes inside, and then shouts at the vampire to come inside, and then you’re boned anyway.
In your hypothetical scenario, if vampires were to somehow gain control of the government, could they simply pass a law stating all vampires are invited in all domiciles?
Yes, but it wouldn’t have the effect you expected because the people still living on those homes have not invited them in.
Invitations are not associative and not transitive. If I invite John to my enter house, that doesn’t allow James to “infer” that he’s also invited, nor does it allow John to invite James into my house.
I mean, mythologically speaking, vampires care about the religion of man because god actually exists and literally defends the faithful from their predation. Vampires also aren’t lawyers, barring an exceptional sci-fi series, so the rules they operate by are mystical and holistic. They can’t enter a home because it is a threshold defined and empowered by those living within, not by the laws that declare their ownership.
Squatters would be safe so long as they saw the place they lived as home. Generally someone who lives within the home and therefore contributes to the threshold is required to invite them in, but sometimes agency can be granted to others (i.e. a doorman or friend), but agency cannot be taken (i.e. the state). So the 4-year-old can invite them in, because it is their house until their parents kick them out. They also can’t cross running water because it purifies evil, same with why they’re burned away by the sun.
That said, it’s not like there’s a clearly defined foundation for their operation, and modern authors have modified how vampires work numerous times, so it really varies on a case by case basis.
