Theologian Tertullian regarded the soul as a body of a special kind linked to semen

The Christian theologian of the 2nd and 3rd centuries Tertullian, known as one of the progenitors of the doctrine of the Trinity, advanced a rather original idea: that all entities are endowed with a peculiar body as their form of existence, the soul included, being "a body of a special kind". According to Tertullian, the soul enters a human being not from outside but from semen, which is the carrier of the soul. Accordingly, he insists that the swallowing of semen is an act of cannibalism.