I see the Nietzschean will to power being manifest through Joseph Smith, through both his creative art in forming scripture, and the characters in his scriptural productions: who express feats of great strength and the overcoming of enemies and obstacles through divine power (as a metaphor for the will to power).
From, location 4849 of The Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism by Stephen Joseph Fleming, Stephen Joseph (Publication Date 2014):
Prophets of Great Power. Just as Smith’s early supernatural invocations suggested a desire for divine power, a number of the people in the Book of Mormon and Smith’s biblical translation obtain such power. Nephi is given power to shock his brothers and the knowledge to build a boat, Ammon is given power to drive off bandits and read minds, Alma is given power to break his bands and knock down a prison, but even greater power is given to Nephi the son of Helaman (whom I call Nephi2 here), the three disciples (whom I call the three Nephites here), the brother of Jared, and Melchizedek and Enoch in Smith’s biblical revision. God gives Nephi2 the power to know secret events and also the power to cause a famine. When the wicked Nephites try to throw him in prison, “he was taken by the Spirit and conveyed out of the midst of them.”[Helaman 7-10, quote at 10:16] The three Nephites ascend into heaven, see unspeakable things and are given power to burst out of prisons, withstand fiery furnaces, and play with wild beasts; Mormon goes so far as to say “that the powers of the earth could not hold them.”[3 Nephi 28:13, 14, 19-22, 39] The brother of Jared moved a mountain; Melchizedek, “when a child he feared God and stop[p]ed the mouths of Lions and quenched the violence of fire.”[Ether 12:30; Smith, Old Testament Revision, [33]] Enoch perhaps had the greatest power. Smith’s revision of the Bible said, And so great was the faith of Enoch that he led the people of God and their enemies came to battle against them and he spake the word of the Lord and the earth trembled and the Mountains fled even according to his command and the rivers of watter [sic] were turned out of their course and the roar of the Lions was heard out of the wilderness and all nations feared greatly so powerful was the word of Enoch and so great was the power of the language which God had given him.[156] Such powers were similar to powers described in sources that Smith likely used. John Allen said that medieval Kabbalists preformed rituals for “extinguishing fires, and to achieve other wonderful exploits,” similar to Smith’s Melchizedek.[157] A number of sources claimed that mythical figures had this kind of power. ... God tells Moses, “Thou shalt be made stronger than many waters; for they shall obey thy command as if thou wert God.”[Smith, Old Testament Revision, [2]; current, Moses 1:25. Such was similar to Exodus 7:1: “And the Lord said unto Moses, See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet.”] In order to see God, Moses says he was “transfigured,” “for I should have withered & died in his presence but his glory was upon me.”[Smith, Old Testament Revision, [1]; Moses 1:11. Augustine said that people had to be changed in order to see God and that Moses had gone through this process. Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teachings of SS Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life, (London: Constable, 1932), 80-81.] The principle example of this transformation was the three Nephites. The three Nephites were among the “twelve disciples” that Jesus chooses to lead the Nephite church. Before leaving, Jesus asks the disciples if there is anything they want from him and nine of the twelve want to enter heaven when they die but three wish to remain on earth to “bring the souls of men unto [Christ] while the world shall stand.” Christ tells them, “Ye have desired the thing which John, my beloved, … desired of me,” a reference to John 21:21-23.[see 3 Nephi 28:6, 9] Proclus taught that there were beings he called “incorruptible souls,” who, although they had achieved perfection and could ascend to the gods, chose to stay on earth to help others.[164] The three are then taken up into heaven where “it did seem unto them like a transfiguration of them, that they were changed from this body of flesh into an immortal state, that they could behold the things of God.” The three then will not die till Christ returns and do the various marvelous acts described above. “And they are as the angels of God,” says Mormon, “There was a change wrought upon them, insomuch that Satan could have no power over them, that he could not tempt them; and they were sanctified in the flesh, that they were holy, and that the powers of the earth could not hold them.”[3 Nephi 28:15, 30, 39.] The description of the three Nephites was similar to Charles Buck’s entry on how eighteenth-century mystic William Law described humanity’s state before the fall. Adam “was made in the image of the Triune God, a living mirror of the divine nature, formed to … live on earth as the angels do in heaven. He was endowed with immortality, so that the elements of this outward world could not have any power of acting on his body.”[166] Being restored to the state before the fall was a primary goals of Christian Platonists. A. D. Nock describes the idea among certain early Christians “that Christ became man in order that man in his entirety might become as God; so could soul and body alike recover Adam’s lost radiance.”[167] Whereas Protestants tended to view the fall and original sin as having made Adam’s prelapsarian state unattainable in this life, Allison Coudert argues that speculation about Adam’s pre-fallen state led to “attempts to restore man to Adam’s original perfection,” so that “by the end of the seventeenth century what might be described as an ‘anthropological revolution’ had occurred: a more optimistic view of human nature emerged and along with it a positive attitude toward life and the ability of humans to change and improve their world and themselves.”[168] Buck’s entry said that Law taught that the spark of divinity in the soul could “bring forth, by degrees, a new birth of that life which was lost in paradise.”[169] The description of the three Nephites in the Book of Mormon suggests that they achieved this state while on earth. However, Mormon then says, “This change was not equal to that which shall take place at the last day…. At that day they were to receive a greater change.” Christ suggests that the three will experience full deification at that point: “Ye shall sit down in the kingdom of my Father … and ye shall be even as I am, and I am even as the Father.”[3 Nephi 28:39, 10]
The prophets of great power make the point that they are not gods [Alma 18:17-19]; their great power sometime leads people to think they are.[Alma 18:2-4; 19:25, Helaman 9:41] Ammon’s description of seers summarizes the point: “A seer is a revelator and a prophet also; and a gift which is greater can no man have, except he should possess the power of God, which no man can; yet a man may have great power given him from God.”[Mosiah 8:16] Full deification for Smith was more than a return to the prelapsarian state. Again, the Book of Mormon taught a fortunate fall: humans came here as part of God’s plan and as Smith would make clear in his Nauvoo speeches, that plan was for humans to have the opportunity to achieve full deification in the next life (Chapter Six). Those who followed the pattern of the prophets of great power while on earth would become gods in the afterlife. The Vision said that celestial people “are priests of the Most High after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son: wherefore, as it is written, they are gods.”[Doctrine and Covenants (1835), 228; current D&C 76:57-58]
