Comte's Great Being is not a metaphor and he was irritable with followers who tried to make it one. It is Humanity conceived as a single continuous organism extended through time, and worship of it is presented as literally appropriate rather than as a useful fiction. The membership is selective: Comte excluded those he judged to have been merely parasitic on the species, which means the Great Being is a moral community rather than a biological one, and someone is doing the excluding. Its depiction as a woman holding a child is a deliberate transposition of the Madonna, on the reasoning that the emotional machinery of Catholicism worked and only its object was wrong.