Can somebody explain the cosmology of Pullman's Dark Materials to me?

A person consists of a physical part, and some kind of ghost part, and a daemon -- When you die you lose your daemon, but your ghost portion goes to some kind of afterlife universe. But you still appear to be you. So what was the daemon? And why should there be some kind of special afterlife universe? Who made that rule?

I don't get it.

Still did enjoy reading the books though.

but the daemon is the soul, I remember that. And the beings in the Underworld or Afterlife are merely ghosts, with no daemon. My interpretation is that the daemon is required to be alive, but once you lose your daemon, you soon die and turn into a ghost, or if you physically die, you lose your daemon and turn into a ghost.

As to the afterlife universe, I dunno. It's made fairly clear that the Authority isn't the creator, but merely the first being in the multiverses. Pullman is working on another book that may clarify things.

I tried the Wiki entry on this, and found out something infuriating. The North American versions of The Amber Spyglass are edited to remove references to Lyra's incipient sexuality. That means I have to get the UK version to read what Pullman intended us to read.

I did the same thing with the first Harry Potter book, and I intend to get the rest of them from amazon.co.uk as soon as I can afford it.