The First Witch is neither fully supernatural nor entirely real—she exists in the threshold between the worlds, a voice that speaks what men already want to believe. She opens the play with her sisters on the “blasted heath,” and her first words—“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”—establish the moral inversion that will govern everything that follows. She and her sisters are not commanders but mirrors; they tell Macbeth what his ambition sounds like when spoken aloud. When she hails him as “Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor,” and “King hereafter,” she is not ordering murder—she is naming a future that Macbeth’s own desire has already written. He does the work of interpreting her words as permission.
What makes the First Witch dangerous is not that she lies, but that she speaks in riddles and equivocations that sound like truth. She tells Macbeth that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth”—a prophecy so seemingly absolute that it releases him into false security. Yet the words are a trap. They are technically true but engineered to deceive; Macduff, “untimely ripped from his mother’s womb,” fulfills the prophecy in a way Macbeth never anticipated. The First Witch’s language does not command; it plants seeds in the mind and watches them grow into murder. By Act 4, when she summons the apparitions that speak these deceptive promises, she has already done her deepest work—not by magic, but by making Macbeth believe that fate can be outrun, that the future is knowable and controllable through present action.
The First Witch speaks sparingly—only 23 lines across the entire play—yet her influence extends through every scene after she exits. She belongs to a world of darkness, storm, and moral chaos that deepens the more Macbeth acts. Whether she is a literal supernatural being or an externalized version of Macbeth’s own divided will remains deliberately unclear; the play never fully answers the question. What is certain is that she represents the cost of ambition: the moment a man believes the future can be seized, he begins the acts that ensure his own destruction. She is the voice that whispers what we fear to want, and then watches, unmoved, as we build our own damnation.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Good is bad, and bad is good: We fly through the mist and dirty air.
First Witch · Act 1, Scene 1
The three witches chant this paradox as they vanish into the mist after promising Macbeth the crown. It is the play's first and most crystalline statement of its moral universe—one where good and evil are inverted, where words lie, where prophecies are traps. Everything that follows is an unraveling of this single inversion.
Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn The power of man, for none of woman born Shall harm Macbeth.
Be violent, brave, and determined; laugh at the power of men, because no one born of a woman will ever harm Macbeth.
First Witch · Act 4, Scene 1
The witches' second apparition gives Macbeth what seems like certain protection. Macbeth believes himself invulnerable and relaxes his guard, ordering the murder of Macduff's family. The irony—that Macduff was untimely ripped from his mother's womb—is the engine of the play's final tragedy, showing how our attempt to escape fate binds us to it.
