Pagan
From the Proto Indo European verb pag, “fasten”, which is also the ancestor of peace, pact, newfangled, pole, peasant, propogate, and travel. In Latin pag became pangere, “to affix or fasten”. In classical times the smallest administrative unit of the Roman Empire was a pagus, so called because it was delimited (”fixed”) by markers (compare Tolkien’s nickname for Rohan, one of the few countries in Middle Earth with fixed borders: “The Mark”). Naturally enough, someone who was from one of these districts (usually far away from the cities) was called a paganus.
At this point the usual story is that as Christianity took over the towns and cities of Rome, the rural areas held fast to the old ways; and thus the word paganus became applied (derogatorily) to non-Christians — equivalent to calling them hillbillies. An alternative theory is that it’s derived from Roman military slang for “civilian, incompetent soldier”, which early Christians picked up alongside the military imagery of the church at that time (i.e. if a Christian was a soldier of Christ, then a non-Christian was a paganus). In either case, the word was borrowed into English in the late 1300’s in its religious sense.
The modern word Pagan has the same phonosemantics as the ancient Proto Indo European root pag – a place, a location that is flexible or spread wide (like open countryside) but is grounded (”fixed”) into the Source.
