Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 1.33

If a soul, having become worthy by certain unspoken decrees, does not enter an entirely irrational body but neither does it enter a purely rational one, it might clothe itself in a monstrous body — one so malformed that reason cannot fully come to completion in it, with a head disproportionate to the rest of the body and conspicuously small. If that body proves too resistant, another of a different kind is taken up, so that the soul becomes somewhat more rational than before; and then still another, as the body's nature offers more or less resistance to reason's reception. Why, then, could there not be some soul that assumes a completely paradoxical body — one that shares enough with human bodies to live among people, yet possesses something exceptional so that the soul might remain untouched by evil? And if the claims of the physiognomists hold — whether Zopyrus or Loxus or Polemon or anyone else who wrote and promised to know something wonderful, teaching that all bodies correspond to the characters of souls — then the one about to sojourn paradoxically in life and to magnify it ought to have been given a body not as Celsus imagines, born from Panthera committing adultery and a virgin committing adultery. For from such a mingling it would have been necessary for a more senseless and harmful teacher of licentiousness, injustice, and the rest of evils to be born, not of sobriety, justice, and the rest of the virtues.