Friedrich Röck's brief 1913 article in Orientalistische Literaturzeitung is a piece of classical philology that identified an important source for Agrippa's treatment of the decans — the 36 divisions of the zodiac — and their associated animal symbols in Book I of the DOP. Writing in the philological idiom of early twentieth-century classical scholarship, Röck traces Agrippa's "Denarzyklus" (the cycle of animals associated with ten-degree zodiacal divisions) to the Babylonian astronomer and astrologer Teukros, whose work survives only in fragments transmitted through later Arabic and Byzantine sources.

The decanic tradition is one of the most ancient layers of astrological symbolism, predating the Greek integration of Babylonian astronomy into the Hellenistic worldview. Each of the 36 decans — twelve signs of the zodiac each divided into three ten-degree portions — had associated with it an image or set of images: typically a human or animal figure with specific characteristics that could be used in the construction of talismans and amulets. Agrippa's treatment of these images in the DOP draws on a long tradition of transmission through Picatrix, Albumasar, and other Arabic intermediaries, but Röck argues that specific features of Agrippa's animal symbolism can be traced back to the Teukros tradition rather than to the Arabic intermediaries.

The article is primarily of interest as a philological source study, and its conclusions have been largely confirmed by later scholarship on the decanic tradition. For students of the DOP, it serves as a reminder of the deep antiquity of some of the textual strata Agrippa was working with: the animal symbols of Book I are not Renaissance inventions but survivals of a Babylonian tradition transmitted through a complex chain of translations and intermediaries spanning two millennia.