Maybe an attempt to make a ceramic magnet pickup sound more like an Alnico V pole-piece pickup.

The Burns Trisonic pickups had a coil around a bar magnet, so this is halfway there. Originally they were made with two bar magnets, one per 3 strings (just end to end so equivalent to a single magnet). The US patent for them indicates an intention to have split coils like a Precision bass or the G&L pickups - either two or three coils, and with two or more outputs for stereo or trieo(?) effects. They were also supposed to be very low impedance with impedance converting transformers. I imagine they realised the production costs of this would make the guitars far too expensive, but had already ordered a big stock of the smaller magnets, so went ahead and used them, despite a single magnet being easier.