The Third Witch is one of three supernatural beings—neither wholly male nor female, neither entirely real nor imaginary—who appear on the blasted heath to hail Macbeth with prophecies that will drive the entire action of the play. She speaks less frequently than her sisters, yet her contributions are crucial to the witches’ riddling pronouncements. In the opening scene, she declares that they will meet Macbeth on the heath, and later hails him as Thane of Cawdor and king hereafter. She participates in the witches’ invocations and spell-craft, her voice joining theirs in the famous chant “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” which announces the moral inversion that will govern the play’s world.
The Third Witch reappears in Act 4 when Macbeth desperately seeks the witches out again, demanding further knowledge of his fate. She and her sisters summon the three apparitions that give Macbeth false comfort: the armed head warning him of Macduff, the bloody child assuring him that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth,” and the child crowned with a tree in his hand, promising him safety until “Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come.” These riddling prophecies are designed to seem reassuring while actually predicting Macbeth’s downfall. The Third Witch’s role in delivering these equivocations is essential—her voice is part of the supernatural machinery that both tempts Macbeth and traps him. Though she speaks infrequently, her words carry the weight of fate itself. By the end of her appearances, she has set in motion the events that will lead to Macbeth’s paranoia, his murders of Banquo and Macduff’s family, and ultimately his death on Macduff’s sword.
The Third Witch embodies the play’s central ambiguity about whether the witches control Macbeth or merely reflect his own desires back to him. She is both external force and internal temptation, both prophet and accomplice to his fall. Her minimal dialogue makes her presence all the more unsettling—she needs few words to suggest that some ancient, malevolent knowledge moves through her. She represents the boundary between the supernatural and the psychological, the gap through which ambition slips into murder.
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.
Third 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.
Third 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.
