Well; for what ostensibly is a secretive, millenial "circle of artists and wizards"; that is an awfully non-cryptographic, weak hash function. Apparently (variants thereof) are commonly used in some JavaScript circles to mimic a popular implementation of Java's String.hashCode() method [1,2,3].
[1] http://werxltd.com/wp/2010/05/13/javascript-implementation-o...
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6122571/simple-non-secure...