Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word pagan derives from Late Latin paganus, itself from classical Latin pagus, meaning a region delimited by markers. Paganus came to mean country dweller, villager, and in Roman military jargon, civilian or non-combatant. It acquired its religious meaning by the mid-4th century, when early Christians adopted it as a pejorative term for non-Christians, though it was not attested in the English language until the 17th century.
No. Until the 20th century, people did not call themselves pagans to describe the religion they practiced. The concept was created by the early Christian Church as a label applied to others, used in a derogatory sense throughout history. It was only in the 20th century that practitioners of modern pagan movements adopted it as a self-descriptor.
The Sabians of Harran were a community in the city of Harran who blended Mesopotamian paganism with Neoplatonism and maintained a pagan identity under Islamic rule. After a decree by Caliph Al-Ma'mun in 830, they adopted the protected legal status of Sabians mentioned in the Quran. The scholar Thabit ibn Qurra, born in 836, founded their most influential scholarly line, transmitting celestial mechanics and Hermetic alchemy into Arabic and eventually European intellectual traditions.
Byzantine scholars used strategies of intellectual dissimulation, known as oikonomia, to preserve pagan texts. Ammonius Hermiae negotiated with the Christian patriarch Proterius to keep his school open. Michael Psellos, active between 1017 and 1078, publicly disavowed astrology while privately studying Proclus and the Chaldaean Oracles. John Italos, who was condemned in 1082 under ten anathemas in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, demonstrated what happened when these disclaimers failed.
Plethon, who lived from around 1355 to 1452, was arguably the most radical proponent of Platonism in the Byzantine world. He secretly authored the Nomoi, a text proposing a comprehensive neo-pagan, polytheistic religious system intended to replace Christianity in a reformed Byzantine state. After his death, Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios discovered and condemned the work, ordering the Nomoi destroyed by fire, though the table of contents survived.
Public awareness of modern paganism grew significantly in 1979 with the publication of Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance. The 1970s had already seen Wicca influenced by feminism, producing Dianic Wicca. Large pagan gatherings expanded in the 1980s, and the growth of the internet in the 1990s accelerated the spread of reconstructionist pagan traditions.