CathInfo.com

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This is a little chart showing the four stages of contact in a total solar eclipse.
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Is this "pagan" too?  
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The sun is the yellow disc and the moon is the black disc. The first contact is when the moon's disc "touches" or first comes in contact with the edge of the sun's disc, from the point of view of the observer on earth. That is, the curved surface of the spherical earth. The fact that the earth's surface is curved is proved by the path of the eclipse over the planet: it is a curved path, the shape of the moon's shadow is stretched out in one direction at the start and in another direction at the end, due to the curvature of the earth's surface and the way the circular shadow of the moon falls on the curved surface of the earth.
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These "contact 2" and "contact 3" diagrams are depicted here a bit off so you can still see the sun, in order to show you how the sun is moving behind the moon, for during totality the sun is entirely hidden behind the moon, as the viewer is standing under the umbra portion of the moon's shadow. The umbra owes its existence to the fact that the moon is much smaller than the sun, about 400 times smaller in diameter. But the moon is much closer to earth than the sun is, about 410 times closer. Since these two figures are so close to the same (400 and 410), the sun's disc and the moon's disc appear to be more or less the same size.

Sometimes the sun looks larger (when the earth is closer to the sun in their paths) than the moon (when the moon is further away in its path from the earth), and sometimes the sun appears smaller than the moon. When the umbra reaches the earth we get a total solar eclipse. When the umbra extends only to a point short of the earth's surface we get partial solar eclipse. Sometimes a particular eclipse can start out partial, become total in the middle, and then fade away as a partial eclipse at the end. There are many possibilities, all due to the fact that the earth's surface is curved and the relative paths of the earth, moon and sun are curved as well.
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The following diagram was made after the 2006 eclipse of March 29th:



The sun's perimeter is shown as a dotted line here instead of a bright ring around the moon's disc in the first diagram, above.
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It's worth noting that while the little grey arrow in the moon here points left, both sun and moon are moving across the sky from left to right, but the moon appears to move to the left because the sun is effectively passing it up as they both traverse the sky above.
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