I almost started a new Episode 93 - Rats in the Walls thread, but thought the better of it.
When Henneth, Sich and Chard got to the bit about the gale, I had a flash. If you consider the gale the same as the cleansing cathartic strike of lightning in other Lovecraft stories (and I guess it probably has an equalizing sense far back in various myths), then take into consideration Lovecraft was writing about Poles, and that the woman whose child was taken actually had a polonized Lithuanian surname, and considering that Poland and Lithuania were joined in a union for centuries and that some of the original immigrants to the United States of America in the 1800s weren't entirely sure if they were Polish, Lithuanian, or both, if you can take all that into consideration, then consider as well the Lithuanian myth, highly romanticized by Polish thinkers in the 19th century, of Perkunas and the Wedding Feast.
Martin Lings talks about this in the chapter Old Lithuanian Songs in Jacob Needleman's compilation called The Sword of Gnosis. E J Harrison in Lithuania, Past and Present also touches upon it (available at
http://www.archive.org/details/lithuaniapastpre00harruoft ).
To put it briefly, the Moon was a male and was married to the Sun, a female, and there was perfect harmony. Then along came Venus in the guise of the Morning Star or Evening Star and tempted Moon away from Sun, so that his attentions wandered. Perkunas, the thunder god, clove Moon's face in twain as punishment, which is how the phases of the Moon came about. (see Harrison, pages 166-167)
There are also old songs about Perkunas ruining a wedding feast, I guess the Moon and Venus were about to get hitched, and when he breaks it up violently as a wild storm he strikes an ancient oak tree with a lightning bolt, which falls and bleeds green blood. (see Lings in Needleman)
Velikovsky collected old myths, such as this one, about Venus and he or von Danniken (or both, I forget) used them to give foundation to the idea that Venus is a recent arrival in the inner solar system, or that the Moon came in rather recently (I forget who argued what, but there is an idea we're on our fifth moon now, the others having fallen down creating havoc upon the Earth).
Other speculators talk about electric charges that fly through space during near misses between planet-sized bodies, during specific allignments of planets and sun and/or during pole shifts/reversals.
Electric discharge leading to restoration of equilibria is a scientific, spiritual and cosmic concept. Lovecraft uses it well, because he doesn't impose morality
per se on the universe, it's nothing personal against Brown Jenkins, it is just nature and cosmos smoothing some wrinkles on their outer garment.
Venus, the Moon and the Sun have a calendrical sense which ties in with Walpurgisnacht, which is really just May Day Eve, or Roodmas in old England, and which forms one arm of the "cross" of the year, the opposite arm being Halloween, with Midsummer's Eve and Yuletide the other two arms. If May Day ushers in spring and is a fertility festival at base, then Walpurgisnacht is sort of a "last fling" for all the forces of darkness that have ruled winter. One of the enduring slurs against Jews in Europe is that they kidnap and murder children around Passover to bake matzo with their blood.
All of this is pretty obvious, but I never really connected it with Lovecraft before, so apologies if I've merely stated the obvious.
One thing I don't understand: if August Derleth thought it was such a stinker, why did he copy parts of Dreams in his Peabody Heritage? Was he re-writing it the way he thought it should have been written originally by Lovecraft, then?
