The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants.

For the rest of his life he remained very close friends with all three including the ascetic and violently anti-humanist Savonarola. The Kabbalah and the Hermetica were thought in Pico's time to be as ancient as the Old Testament and for that reason he accorded them an almost scriptural status. "
A portion of his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem was publiGiovanni Pico della Mirandolad in Bologna after his death.

He is famed for the events of 1486 when at the age of 23 he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion philosophy natural philosophy and magic against all comers for which he wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance" and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the “Hermetic Reformation. ".