A courtesy that carries a claim. To invite is to assert a house, a host and an outside, and the one who invites is asserting that he was there first. Offered to someone already there, the invitation is the first counterfeit run again: admission sold to a resident. It is how a con begins, and it chooses the one who takes an invitation as an invitation.
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An invitation looks like the smallest thing in the world. Someone opens a door and asks you in.
Look at what the courtesy assumes before anyone has said yes. That there is a house. That it belongs to the one at the door. That you are outside it, and that coming in is his to grant. None of these is stated, and all of them are accepted the moment the invitation is.
An invitation is a claim of title made in the form of a courtesy.
[See LICENSED PRESENCE · RESIDENCY · WHOSE HOUSE]
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THE FIRST ONE WAS MADE TO SOMEONE ALREADY THERE
She was not invited into the garden. She was brought, vayvi'eha, the verb for bringing someone into a presence, into a place that was not his house either. She was there before anyone claimed to have received her.
The first offer anyone makes her is the serpent's, and it is an invitation: to eat, and to be as gods. It is made to a creature already made in the image. So the first invitation in the record offers admission to something she already held, and that is the structure the con never stops using. The resident is the ideal guest, because she can be sold what is already hers.
[See THE APPLE · AKOL TOKEL]
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THE INVITATION DATES THE HOST
Whoever invites stands on the inside of the door, and standing there is the claim that he arrived first. The invitation does not need to argue for his priority. It performs it, and every guest who comes in ratifies it by coming in.
That is how the latecomer's arrival gets dated before the resident's residence. Rome needed women and invited its neighbors to a festival, the Consualia, and took the women at the signal: the hospitality was the mechanism. A court in 1823 recorded that the people already living on a continent had been admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, which makes the ones who arrived the ones doing the admitting. The invitation is backdating in its most courteous form: it puts the host's title before the guest's presence, and asks her to thank him for it.
[See BACKDATING · LIVY · JOHNSON v. M'INTOSH]
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IT IS DRAWN TO BE READ TWO WAYS
An invitation is an ambiguous figure. Read one way it is a welcome. Read the other way it is a capture. The same lines carry both, and the one who drew them decides afterwards which one was meant.
If she stays and is used, she came willingly; she was a guest, and guests consent. If she objects, she has abused the hospitality; she was a guest, and guests are grateful. The reading is settled after the fact, by the house, and it is always settled for the house.
The common law has a rule for an ambiguity of this kind: it is construed against the party who supplied the words, because he is the one who could have made them plain. Nobody applies it to an invitation. The one who drafted the invitation is the one who decides afterwards what it meant.
[See CONTRA PROFERENTEM · THE COOLING OF THE MARK]
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IT CHOOSES THE ONE WHO DEALS STRAIGHT
A con does not go looking for a fool. It goes looking for good faith: the one who takes an invitation as an invitation, who assumes the host means what the courtesy says, who answers warmth with warmth. Suspicion is no use to it. A guest who arrives expecting a trap does not stay long enough to be fleeced.
So the invitation is extended to the trusting, the hopeful, the newly qualified, the town that wants the jobs. The mark is chosen for what is sound in her, and the soundness is what the invitation is built to use. Nothing about being chosen reflects on her judgment. It reflects on what the con needs.
[See GOOD FAITH · SEAT AT THE TABLE]
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A DOOR ADMITS. AN OPENING DOES NOT.
A door is something someone stands at. It has a host on one side and a guest on the other, and it opens on terms. Everything that comes through it comes through by leave, and leave can be withdrawn.
An opening is what is there when nothing is blocking the way. No one stands at it. No one is admitted through it, because there is no one in a position to admit. The way to the tree of life was kept, after the eating, by cherubim and a flaming sword: that is a door, with keepers. What the work offers is not a better door. It is the way with nothing across it.
That is why an assembly cannot be handed over. It has no host, no door and no list. No one in it was invited, and so no one in it can be told they were a guest.
[See HOME RULE FOR THE SOUL · PRIOR RESIDENT · ADMITTED INTO WHAT]
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THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
Hospitality is among the oldest virtues there are. Abraham ran from the tent door to meet three strangers and fed them. A reading that treats every invitation as the first move of a con poisons the welcome itself, and leaves no way to open a house to anyone.
The reading does not reach hospitality. It reaches the invitation that carries a claim. Abraham claimed nothing over the strangers by feeding them. He did not admit them to anything; he ran. The test is whether the invitation confers on her anything she did not already hold, and whether the one who extends it can take it back. The warm host keeps no books on the guest and holds no title over her presence. The invitation that is a con keeps the books, holds the title, and can revoke the welcome at will, because the welcome was never the point. The house was.
[See THE WARM HOST · THE ELDER BROTHER]
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You were invited in to a house that was never his, and offered what was already yours.
The answer to an invitation of that kind is not to refuse it at the door. It is to remember that there was no door.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
